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/exploring-codebases

@5e58100
by Oskar Austegardoaustegard/claude-skills150 stars
6

First-encounter orientation on a repository nobody here has worked in yet. Runs a fixed five-step workflow — venv setup, tarball fetch, tree-sitting structural scan, featuring synthesis, then reasoning over the two — and yields an account of what the repo contains and how it is arranged, optionally written out as _FEATURES.md. Use for "I just cloned this", "what is this repo", "what does this do", "explore this repo", "give me an orientation", "what are the main features", "review what's new in this repo", or before starting work in a codebase you have not seen. This is the divergent what's-here skill. Route elsewhere for: a named symbol, a file's structure or a line range (tree-sitting); all callers of a Python symbol (searching-codebases); teaching a human the codebase through exercises (orienting-codebases); fetching or cloning a repo without analysing it (accessing-github-repos, cloning-project).

Ask your Agent

Use this Skill: https://skilld.dev/gh/oaustegard/claude-skills/exploring-codebases

This session only. Nothing lands on disk.

CHANGELOG.md

≈796 tokens on demand. Your agent reads this file only when SKILL.md points to it.

exploring-codebases - Changelog

All notable changes to the exploring-codebases skill are documented in this file. The format is based on Keep a Changelog.

[2.5.2] - 2026-09-09

Other

  • prompt-audit: dated prompting patterns across the skill catalogue (#791)

[2.5.1] - 2026-08-25

Other

  • creating-skill: use Anthropic's quick_validate.py instead of a hand-rolled check (#775)

[2.5.0] - 2026-08-25

Fixed

  • repair broken frontmatter, mark obsolete skills, close registry gaps (#746)

Other

  • Applicability boundaries, real failure signals, findable descriptions (#774)
  • featuring: fix source=None crash on cache hit, add --orient (#770)

[2.4.0] - 2026-07-16

Added

  • subagent context-handoff guidance (exploring-codebases 2.4.0, agent-routing 1.2.0) (#733)

[2.3.1] - 2026-06-21

Fixed

  • install tree-sitter core, not language-pack (step 0) (#708)

[2.3.0] - 2026-05-20

Other

  • exploring-codebases v2.3.0: add bm25 pairing

[2.3.0] - 2026-05-18

Added

  • bm25 skill pairing — routing table entries for "which files are most about X?" / "rank by concept" queries, plus a "Pairing bm25 with this workflow" subsection covering the bm25→tree-sitting follow-through pattern and the --exclude tests/* lesson from fly #656.

[2.2.1] - 2026-04-21

Other

  • exploring-codebases v2.2.1: good/bad batching examples (salvaged from #559) (#565)

[2.2.0] - 2026-04-20

Other

  • exploring-codebases v2.2.0: step-0 setup, ref variants, sanity check, drill-optional (#561)

[2.1.0] - 2026-04-20

Other

  • exploring-codebases: TODO-style workflow (tarball-first, batched treesit) (#560)
  • Remove _MAP.md files, direct agents to tree-sitting for code navigation (#545)

[2.0.0] - 2026-04-08

Added

  • add treesit.py CLI, fix cross-process cache loss, fix Symbol dict bug (#536)

Other

  • exploring-codebases: remove dead search.py (replaced by tree-sitting)

[1.0.0] - 2026-03-31

Added

  • add mapping-features skill for behavioral web app documentation (#432)
  • implement issues #229, #231, #281, #282, #283 (v4.3.0)

Other

  • exploring v1.0.0, searching v2.0.0: tree-sitting replaces mapping-codebases
  • Regenerate _MAP.md files after @lat: backlink insertion (#504)
  • Lattice v2: bidirectional source-anchored knowledge graph (#503)

[0.3.1] - 2026-02-13

Fixed

  • parse multi-line signatures in --use-maps mode

[0.3.1] - 2026-02-13

Fixed

  • Fix --use-maps mode failing to parse multi-line signatures in _MAP.md files
  • Functions with long parameter lists (spanning multiple lines in map files) are now correctly parsed
  • Full multi-line signatures are accumulated and displayed properly

Added

  • Document scope and limitations: which code elements are returned vs not

[0.3.0] - 2026-02-13

Added

  • Address top 3 priority GitHub issues (#253, #254, #276)
  • fix three issues - aliases, expansion threshold, return format (v3.7.0)

[0.2.0] - 2026-02-03

Added

  • Add/Update skill: exploring-codebases
  • Add/Update skill: exploring-codebases

Other

  • Update README with project inspiration details

Source: SKILL.md on GitHub

Third-party checks

2 warnings14d4 checks · Risk SAFE
  • Gen Agent Trust Hub14d

    This skill allows an AI agent to explore new codebases by downloading them from GitHub and performing structural analysis. It is designed to help the agent orient itself in unfamiliar repositories. The security profile is generally safe as it uses trusted sources, but there is an inherent risk of indirect prompt injection because the agent is tasked with processing and reasoning over untrusted external code.

  • Socket14d

    No alerts

  • Snyk14d

    Risk: MEDIUM · 1 issue

  • Runlayer7mo

    7/7 files flagged

Provenance

Signed by skilld at 5e58100. This ties the file your Agent reads to that commit on GitHub. It does not review the instructions.

Last checked against GitHub yesterday.

Activeupdated 3 weeks ago

Capability

metadata
{
  "version": "2.5.2"
}

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README badge for oaustegard/claude-skills/exploring-codebases