exploring-codebases
SolidFirst-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).
Install
Quality Score: 84/100
Skill Content
Details
- Author
- oaustegard
- Repository
- oaustegard/claude-skills
- Created
- 10 months ago
- Last Updated
- today
- Language
- Python
- License
- MIT
Similar Skills
Semantically similar based on skill content — not just same category
repo-discovery
Use when the user says 'explore this repo', 'what does this codebase do', 'give me an overview of this repo', 'onboard me to this project', or opens work in an unfamiliar repo before making changes. Read-only: surface scan, entry points (README/CLAUDE.md/ARCHITECTURE.md), source tree, key files.
explain-codebase
Onboard to an unfamiliar codebase by mapping its architecture, entry points, and data flow. Use when starting work in a new or unknown repository and you need a navigable mental model fast.
codebase-tour
Orient someone in an unfamiliar codebase — the entry points, the architecture, the request/data flow, and where you'd go to make a given change — by reading the actual code and mapping it, not by summarizing the file tree. Use this whenever the user is new to a repo, asks "how does this work", "where do I start", "walk me through this codebase", "how is this organized", "where would I add X", or has just cloned/inherited a project and needs to get productive. Also use when onboarding to a large or undocumented codebase.