Code Exploration Tools
Drive AI agents through a million lines of code you did not write. Recon, surgical navigation, codemods, characterization tests, and a toolkit of four reusable skills you keep.
The fork is cloned and open. First thing I check is git remote -v, which points at my repo, not Microsoft's. I do not plan on contributing back. That is a decision I have to make immediately, before I touch anything, because it changes how I stay current with main.
Then I set the rule that governs the rest of this course:
I do not get to look at the source code.
No poking around in directories. No opening files to see what is in them. There are better tools for that, and the whole point is to learn them.
First question: what kind of code is even in here? For that I use Tokei, which crawls the repo and breaks it down by language. It tells me there is Bash, some C, some C#. I suspect it wandered into something it should not have, and I am not going to go verify that, because the rule is the rule.
Second question: how big is it? du -sh * | sort gives me the shape of the thing.
src, 144MBextensions, 99MB
That is what we are working with.
Right now I am not using AI at all. I am getting a feel for the place and starting to guess at what I keep and what I strip. But you do not get to strip anything until you understand why it is there.
Chesterton's Fences. Go look it up.
Drive AI agents through a million lines of code you did not write. Recon, surgical navigation, codemods, characterization tests, and a toolkit of four reusable skills you keep.