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Pete Benoit
Pete Benoit

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The First Thing I Do When I Open a Project

There's a specific kind of blank-stare moment many developers know. You open a project, something you cloned, something you built yourself last spring, and you just stare. The code is right there. The context is completely gone.

I built a VS Code extension called Explain This Project to solve this.

One command gives you structure analysis, dependency mapping, git diagnostics showing which files break the most, and a plain-text summary via Copilot. All in one file at your project root.

I recently added git diagnostics after reading a great post by Ally Piechowski on the git commands she runs before reading any code. I thought it was an amazing idea, and added it to my extension.

You can read more about it here.

peterbenoit.com/blog/first-thing-open-project

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