repowise

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One index. Three ways to use it.

Understand the code	Change it safely	Improve it continuously
Ask cited questions · explore architecture and execution flows · read always-current docs · recover the decisions behind the code	See symbol-level blast radius · run only the tests a diff exercises · catch missing companion files · detect breaking contracts before merge	Find defect-prone files · separate maintainability from performance risk · remove dead code · hand concrete, graph-aware refactoring plans to an agent

These are not disconnected scanners. The graph locates what git history flags; code health measures it; tests show what guards it; decisions explain why it exists; and the same evidence reaches your agent, editor, pull request, local dashboard, and cross-repository system map.

Pick your front door

If you care about…	Start here
A coding agent that understands the repository	Repowise finds the right files, returns task-shaped context in fewer calls, and proactively supplies decisions and risk. For agents ↓
Safer pull requests and faster test feedback	Get change risk, symbol-level callers, co-change partners, and a measured or graph-inferred test run list before merge. Change intelligence ↓
Finding and fixing the code most likely to hurt you	A defect-validated 1–10 health score across defect risk, maintainability, and performance, followed by the concrete refactoring plan. Code health ↓
Understanding an estate, not one repository	Match backend and frontend contracts, catch breaking providers, map downstream services, enforce architecture rules, and query every repo through one MCP endpoint. Workspaces ↓
Rolling this out across an engineering organization	Keep analysis on your infrastructure, give agents and reviewers the same evidence, and add commercial licensing, security controls, custom extensions, and SLA-backed support. Teams and enterprise ↓

Start in minutes (no API key)

pip install repowise
cd /path/to/your/repo
repowise init --no-prose -y
repowise serve

That builds the graph, git, decisions, health, dead-code and structural-wiki layers locally. Connect Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or any MCP host, or open the dashboard. init wires Claude Code automatically. Then ask your agent: "Use Repowise get_overview to summarize this repository" or "What breaks if I change src/auth.py?"

Full setup, every agent, and optional model-written prose →

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Your agent stops guessing

Every question your agent asks about a repository has an answer that could have been computed ahead of time. Who calls this function? What breaks if I change it? Why is it written this way? Which files are actually dangerous? Without an index, the agent rediscovers that answer on every task: grep, read, re-read, forget.

Repowise exposes ten task-shaped MCP tools to Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, VS Code and anything else that speaks MCP: graph, git, docs, decisions, and ten MCP tools behind one index. See the canonical surface. Most tools are built around data entities (one file, one symbol), which forces agents into long chains of sequential calls. These are built around tasks: pass several targets in one call, get complete context back.

Because the exploration work is already done, that phase mostly disappears. In a measured agent loop across 43 questions on django/django, Repowise cut the agent's own output by 31.6% (p<0.0001) and reached the answer in 3.8 tool calls instead of 7.2. That is the end-to-end result.

One mechanism is much larger but narrower: loading a commit's context through get_context costs 393 tokens instead of 13,984, or 97.2% less. That is one retrieval payload, not a claim of 97.2% total agent savings. Both measurements and every competitor row are published in the benchmark report.

And it arrives without being asked. Optional hooks push context into the session at the moment it matters: the governing architectural decision when your agent edits a file that decision covers, a warning when it touches a file with a run of recent bug fixes, a compact briefing at session start. Repowise also generates your CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md from the real index, so even an agent with no MCP support starts informed.

It learns from how you actually work. Repowise reads your own agent transcripts for the corrections you keep making ("use the shared HTTP client, not raw requests") and turns the durable ones into tracked decisions it delivers back later. The wiki generation budget tilts toward the modules you and your agent ask about most. All local, all deterministic, no extra LLM calls.

Foundation	What it contributes
Graph	File + symbol dependencies across 25 AST-parsed languages, confidence-stamped call resolution, communities, centrality, cycles, and execution flows
Git	Hotspots, ownership, co-change, bus factor, and bug-fix history: behavioral signals static analysis cannot see
Docs	A wiki for every module and file, rebuilt incrementally with freshness and confidence scoring plus hybrid search
Decisions	Architectural rationale mined from five index-time sources plus human and agent capture, each claim traced to evidence
Code health	49 deterministic detectors across defect risk, maintainability, and performance, followed by concrete refactoring plans

The structural wiki needs no model. Model-written prose is an optional upgrade, one page or directory at a time. Six of the seven decision sources are deterministic too; only comment archaeology needs a provider.

The intelligence layers → · How the graph earns trust →

Also: stop paying for output nobody reads

Most of what an agent reads back from a shell command is noise: 300 lines of passing tests wrapped around 4 failures, full commit bodies when it asked "what changed recently". repowise distill <cmd> compresses command output before the agent reads it, errors first, exit code preserved.

repowise distill pytest          # 61% fewer tokens, all 11 failure lines kept
repowise distill git log -50     # 89% fewer tokens
repowise saved                   # what distillation saved you, in tokens and dollars

Nothing is lost. Every omission leaves an inline [repowise#<ref>] marker that repowise expand <ref> reverses in full, so the agent can always pull the detail back without re-running the command. Small outputs pass through untouched. An opt-in hook rewrites noisy commands automatically, shown to you for approval first.

Full guide: docs/agent/DISTILL.md →

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Know what's dangerous before you merge

Four deterministic signals, all computed from the graph and git history, no LLM:

• Change risk. Score any commit or base..HEAD range 0-10 from the shape of the diff, ranked against your repo's own recent commits. PR mode returns directives rather than vibes: may_break, missing_cochanges, missing_tests, tests_to_run. One command: repowise risk main..HEAD. (reference →)
• Bug history. Which files and symbols actually get bug-fixed, and how recently. Doc, test and config commits are filtered out so the count means what it says, and a file with a run of recent fixes gets flagged as a bug magnet while you edit it. (reference →)
• Test intelligence. Which tests reach a file and which ones a diff actually exercises, from the call graph, with or without a coverage report. (reference →)
• Change coordination. Which other open branches edit the files you are editing, every row saying why it is listed (same file, or a co-change pair with the commit counts behind it), and whether the diff in front of you is one change or several groups the index links nothing between. Both stay quiet when there is nothing to report. repowise overlap and repowise risk. (reference →)

Plus the free Repowise PR Bot, which puts all of it on every pull request. Zero LLM calls.

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Which tests cover this file, without a coverage report

Ingest LCOV, Cobertura or Clover and you get the measured answer. Most repositories never produce one, so the graph answers instead: a test file that imports a source file reaches it, which is a recorded edge rather than the name-shaped guess everything else falls back to.

That fallback fails in both directions, and this repo is the proof. Five of its six worst bug-magnet files have no test named for them and read as untested while the graph names 3 to 23 test files each. The sixth is worse: matching on basename paired the health engine with the distill engine's tests and called it tested.

repowise impacted-tests main..HEAD   # only the tests this diff actually exercises
repowise health                      # untested hotspots, now graph-aware

Dogfooded against a real coverage run --contexts=test: 95.7% precision on what reaches a file and 97.5% on the run list, at a 100% hit rate, against 72.1% and 94.8% for the one-hop import walk this replaced. The two tiers are never averaged: rows are stamped basis: "measured" or "inferred", measured wins outright where both can answer, and the inferred tier may never produce a percentage. Sound as a floor, unsound as a quantity, and labelled so. Test intelligence →

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The PR bot

Install the GitHub App and the index shows up where the decision actually gets made. One comment per pull request, edited in place on every push rather than reposted, and a green PR gets no comment at all.

See a real comment on a real PR, not a mockup: repowise-dev/repowise#1204.

What decides a review is inline. What is context sits behind one fold, so the comment stays about seventeen rows whatever it finds.

• Blast radius, at symbol level. The contracts this PR changed and every caller of them in a file the PR does not touch. Importing a module says nothing about whether the function you changed is the one being called, so file-level impact is the wrong altitude for the question a reviewer actually has.
• Before you merge. The tests that import your changed files, and the files that changed alongside them in past commits but are missing here.
• A Check Run that can gate the merge, with annotations on the specific lines the PR added. Advisory by default.
• Change risk, scored against the repository's own commit distribution rather than an absolute scale, so it stays meaningful on a repo whose typical commit is large.
• AI vs human authorship of the changed files, with the average health of each.
• Then hotspots, hidden coupling, declining health, dead code and the change map, one fold down.

And a page the comment links to

Markdown runs out. The comment shows three callers and says "+6 more"; the page shows all nine. Public, no sign-in, on a repository the reader has never seen.

The page leads with change risk and newly introduced findings, then maps every changed file and outside caller across the repository. See it live →

Install the PR bot → · how it works →

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★ Know exactly what to fix

A score that says "this file is risky" is where most tools stop. Repowise scores every file, locates where the risk concentrates, and then names the specific fix.

Every file is scored 1-10 by 49 deterministic detectors (McCabe complexity, brain methods, LCOM4 cohesion, god classes, native Rabin-Karp clone detection, untested hotspots, change entropy, prior-defect history and more), split into three lenses: defect risk, maintainability, and performance: static N+1 and I/O-in-loop risk traced across files through the call graph, where file-local linters found 0 of the cross-function cases and repowise surfaced ~90. Only 26 of the 49 are permitted to move the defect number, because that is the number carrying published accuracy claims.

Zero LLM calls, zero cloud, zero new runtime dependencies. Pure Python over tree-sitter and git data, under 30 seconds on a 3,000-file repo, a budget enforced by a CI test, not an estimate. Marker weights are calibrated against a real defect corpus, not hand-tuned: every file scored at a commit preceding the bug window so nothing leaks backward, and an L2-logistic fit with file size as an explicit control, so a marker only earns weight for defect lift beyond being big. Only the learned constants ship.

It proves itself on your repo, not just on a benchmark. After every index, Repowise checks its own flags against your git history and reports what it found: "16 of the 20 lowest-health files had a bug fix in the last 6 months, 3.3x the 24% baseline." If that number is bad on your codebase, you will see it. (It is an association on your indexed history, not a forward prediction, the leakage-free version is in the benchmarks.)

Then it names the fix. Not "this class is too big", but Extract Class, Extract Helper, Move Method, Break Cycle, Split File, or Extract Method, with the exact methods, edges and symbols that move, the blast radius of callers and co-changing files that have to move with them, and a graph-aware ranking so a fix on a central hub outranks the same fix on a leaf. Extract Method goes down to an intra-procedural dataflow pass that lifts the exact span and infers a behavior-preserving signature.

repowise health                        # KPIs and lowest-scoring files
repowise health --refactoring-targets  # ranked, concrete plans
repowise health --trend                # snapshots plus declining-health alerts

The dashboard renders each plan as a card with a copy-to-agent button. An optional LLM step, never in the indexing path and only on request, expands any plan into generated code and a unified diff.

Validated on 21 open-source repos across 9 languages (2,826 files, scored at a fixed point and checked against the following 6 months of bug fixes, keyword-labelled): ROC AUC 0.737 [0.683, 0.787]. The signal is correlated with file size and weakens sharply within a fixed size band, which we report rather than bury. Independently recomputed from the raw data.

Against CodeScene, the leading commercial code-health tool, on the same 2,770 files and the same defect labels, ranking by repowise health surfaces 2.3x the defects under a fixed review budget (paired, p = 0.003). Full head-to-head, methodology and limitations →

Guides: code health · refactoring

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See all of it

repowise serve starts the full web dashboard next to the MCP server. No separate setup, all local.

Also in there: Chat (ask the codebase in natural language) · Docs (the generated wiki, with Mermaid and a graph sidebar) · Architecture and C4 (Context → Containers → Components) · Knowledge Graph plus a zoomable canvas map · Risk, Hotspots, Coupling and Blast radius · Contributors · Decisions (evidence drawer and evolution timeline) · Symbols · Security · Dead code · Stats · Costs · Workspace.

Every view and what each one answers: docs/start/DASHBOARD.md →

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One intelligence layer across your software estate

Real systems are not one repository, and the expensive failures live in the gaps between them. Change a backend contract and Repowise can name the frontend calls that consume it, the services downstream, the historical companion files missing from the change, and the architecture rule the new dependency violates before it ships.