Drop an AI agent into code it has never seen, and it spends its first minutes the way a new hire does. It wanders. It opens folders, reads files that turn out not to matter, and burns time on the scenery. Repomap hands it a map instead.
What it does
It makes two things. The first is an overview of the whole project on a few pages, with its areas, where things start and what lives where. The second is a task map. Tell it what you want done, and it lists the files that matter for that, the most important first. Nexus, our AI engineer, reads both before it touches anything.
Better than search
The fair question is whether a map beats a plain text search. So we measured it, on projects we never used to tune Repomap.
| Finding the right files for a task | Score |
|---|---|
| Repomap’s task map | 66.4 |
| A plain text search | 62.4 |
| The version we started from | 33.9 |
The score is out of 100. It is higher when the files a real change touched show up near the top of the first ten results.
With an agent reading it
A map is for reading. We gave a fresh AI agent one map and asked it to name up to five files for a real task. It ran no commands and saw nothing else.
| Who picks the five files | Right files found |
|---|---|
| An agent with the overview and the task map | 87% |
| An agent with the task map | 83% |
| An agent with the overview | 79% |
| Repomap’s own top five, no agent | 69% |
How many of the right files were among the five picks, over 83 real tasks from projects we never used to tune Repomap.
It reads your language
It reads C and C++, Rust, Go, TypeScript and JavaScript, Svelte and Vue. We checked its C reader against another widely used tool that reads code. In the kernel it finds 997 of every 1,000 functions, and 999 of every 1,000 it finds are real. We ran it over 220,477 C and C++ files on our own machine, and it never crashed once. A typical question takes about 17 milliseconds after a first run, on our test projects.
Where it is weakest
A task described in words the code never uses is hard for any map. There, Repomap does about as well as a plain text search. In the kernel, a task that does not say which part it is about could belong to any of thousands of drivers, and no tool can know which. We publish those results too.
Why it matters for you
The faster an AI finds the right place, the less you pay for it to look, and the more of its attention goes to the actual work. Repomap is how our own AI starts every job.