Show HN: I vibe-coded a tool to decode a legacy system nobody understood

4 points by seng 18 hours ago

My team came to me: "We can't estimate this project. We don't understand how the system works."

  We'd inherited a decade-old Yii2 codebase. Two previous teams had tried and failed to modernize it. The code followed proper patterns—ORM, fat models, MVC—but one feature would
  touch 40+ files across 8 layers. Original developers gone. Docs from 2019.

  Cursor and Claude Code couldn't help. They're brilliant at individual files, but they can't see how features connect across hundreds of files. Limited context windows. No memory
  between sessions.

  So I vibe-coded something to solve it. Not a professional dev—founder desperation.

  18 months later, it's CodeCompass:
  - Maps capabilities to scattered code
  - Traces logic across layers
  - Answers "how does X work?" in seconds
  - Gives AI assistants persistent context

  Open sourced it. Every enterprise I talk to has this same problem.

  https://pearlthoughts.com/codecompass