Staying Oriented in a Growing Codebase
Understanding grows as you touch the code.
Most days, my development pattern starts the same way. I open a file, I make a small change, and with a bit of luck, my editor stays quiet.
That silence is meaningful. It means the tools I trust have done their job. Linters, formatters, and type checkers are some of the most successful tools our industry has ever built. They help us move quickly without constantly second-guessing our basic syntax or types. When they’re happy, we usually are too.
That silence helps me move forward. But in practice, code rarely follows a straight path.
The Paging-In Tax
When I start a task, I usually carry only a rough sense of direction. The path sharpens as I move: I follow a call site, jump to a definition, and trace a prop back to its source.
But as I move deeper, the flow of the codebase begins to compete for space in my head.
We’ve all been there: you have six tabs pinned because they represent a logical flow you can’t afford to lose. You’re holding a complex trace in your short-term memory, afraid that if someone interrupts you for a quick question, that entire mental stack will collapse.
We often say, “Hold on, I need to look at the code,” but what we’re really doing is paging context back in. We are re-reading the same twenty lines not because they are complex, but because we need to remember how they relate to the file we were in three minutes ago.
Maintaining the Map
That mental map isn’t free. As projects grow and teams change, the sheer volume of “connectivity” starts to outpace our memory. This isn’t a sign of a bad codebase; it’s just the nature of systems. Information is spread across files, but the logic lives in the space between them.
This is the space Unfault is designed for.
Unfault acts as a persistent layer for that cognitive context, as a collection of facts about how the system hangs together. It doesn’t ask you to change your workflow or learn a new paradigm. Instead, it moves alongside you, capturing the relationships and traces that usually live only in your head.
It’s about making the “where was I?” moments disappear, so you can spend less time orienting and more time actually building.