Compass

Compass

Understand the shape of a codebase before you change it. Compass is a local-first Rust workbench for architecture maps, dependency paths, impact analysis, and Git history.

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Compass turns source code and project artifacts into a directed, queryable knowledge graph. It gives people and coding assistants a shared map of symbols, files, communities, relationships, and evidence.

large codebase
     |
     v
  Compass  ----->  architecture map
     |           \-> dependency and impact answers
     |            \-> exact CompassQL results
     |             \-> historical graph diffs
     |              \-> focused context for assistants
     v
less searching, smaller context, traceable evidence

What Compass gives you

Compass covers the path from repository orientation to verified automation:

Need	Compass capability
Understand an unfamiliar repository	Communities, architecture reports, god-node detection, and interactive HTML
Find implementation paths	Natural-language graph discovery, symbol explanations, and directed paths
Estimate change impact	Reverse dependency traversal and version-to-version topology diffs
Automate structural checks	Deterministic, read-only CompassQL with JSON and JSONL output
Ask questions about old revisions	Immutable graph realizations for exact Git commits
Give assistants focused context	Native skills, hooks, MCP serving, and compact graph queries
Connect other tools	Graph JSON, GraphML, SVG, Wiki, Obsidian, Neo4j, FalkorDB, and other exports

Structural extraction and graph queries run locally. They do not require Python, embeddings, a vector database, model credentials, or runtime parser downloads.

See the graph before you open every file

Compass exports a self-contained workbench. Move from a repository map to subsystem flow, call evidence, or bounded dependency neighborhoods without changing snapshots.

  <strong>Architecture map · ripgrep</strong>Subsystem boundaries, call direction, and source-backed details.
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  <strong>Repository map · CLI11</strong>Large-scale structure with communities, filters, and a minimap.
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  <strong>Call graph · ripgrep</strong>Follow callers, callees, direction, depth, and evidence coverage.
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  <strong>Dependency lens · ripgrep</strong>Inspect bounded relationships while keeping the surrounding context visible.
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These are real Compass exports from public repositories, not product mockups: BurntSushi/ripgrep and CLIUtils/CLI11. Counts and visible symbols reflect those exact revisions and will change as the projects evolve.

Find the answer at the right scale