2025-12-21

Tools for quickly understanding unfamiliar repos

I’ve recently had to come up to speed with a few new repos rather quickly. scc was useful for counting lines of code. I normally use tokei but scc has complexity estimations that seem to be reasonable when inspecting repos relative to one another.

git-quick-stats was also useful for quickly figuring out who are the key contributors to a repository and how active it is. I was quite hopeful for git-fame but almost immediately ran into an active issue and abandoned it for now.

I’ve also found LLM prompts for creating architecture diagrams and module descriptions to be quite useful.