NEneprotivo·Aug 14, 2026
Improving code understanding is the main focus of my work and thinking right now. If we want to make advances I believe that we should rely more heavily on one key quality of the program code: It is meant to be executed.
Here are some ideas:
1. Time travel debugging. Reading a PR just like a wall of text is difficult, but what if you could step through the PR and see the state at a given line for some test executions? Time travel debugging can make this possible. You would collect a debug trace and use it to overlay the PR diff with additional controls and information to resemble a debugger's UI. I was part of the team behind Codetracer (https://github.com/metacraft-labs/codetracer) who is trying to work in this direction.
2. Test suites and coverage. We don't use them enough for understanding right now. The test suite encodes what featur
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es the code is supposed to have, and the coverage tells us where in the code those features are implemented. I'm playing with an idea about this here: http://atlas.vihren.dev When we intersect coverages for the different test cases we can arrive at code segments which represent "atomic behaviors" present in the code. They form a mathematical structure which can be represented as a graph. I am currently exploring what value we can extract from it for the benefit of both humans and agents.