mapping-codebases

name	mapping-codebases
description	DEPRECATED — superseded by tree-sitting. This skill generated persistent _MAP.md files; tree-sitting does the same AST extraction at runtime (~700ms for 250 files) with no artifact to write, commit, or keep in sync. Use tree-sitting for "map this codebase", "explore repo", "understand structure", or any code navigation task. The final working version is archived at release mapping-codebases-v0.8.0.
metadata	{"version":"0.9.0"}

Mapping Codebases (deprecated)

Use tree-sitting instead.

Why

This skill wrote _MAP.md files to disk — a persisted symbol inventory per directory, generated once and read many times. That tradeoff made sense when scanning was expensive. It isn't: tree-sitting parses a 250-file repo in about 700ms and answers queries against the in-memory AST in under a millisecond.

A persisted map costs what a runtime scan does not — it goes stale, it needs regenerating, it gets committed, and it must be excluded from every other tool that walks the tree. Nothing was gained for that.

Replacement commands

TREESIT=/mnt/skills/user/tree-sitting/scripts/treesit.py

# Was: codemap.py /path/to/repo          → root orientation
python3 $TREESIT /path/to/repo

# Was: reading every _MAP.md in the tree → full inventory
python3 $TREESIT /path/to/repo --depth=-1 --detail=sparse

# Was: grepping _MAP.md for a symbol     → direct lookup
python3 $TREESIT /path/to/repo --no-tree 'find:parse_input'

The archived version

The last working release is mapping-codebases-v0.8.0 (2026-03-31). It carries scripts/codemap.py and the eleven bundled parsers/*.so grammars. The release is the snapshot; nothing in this directory reproduces it.

Note that v0.8.0 ships a latent bug: codemap.py:1216 calls an unimported get_parser() inside a try swallowed by a bare except Exception, so HTML inline-JavaScript symbol extraction silently returned nothing. It will not be fixed.