Investigate Codebase
Evidence-backed codebase investigation instead of confident tours
About
A single portable skill for orienting in unfamiliar repositories: it builds the smallest model that answers the actual question, with every claim tied to evidence or explicitly marked unknown. Four modes cover orienting, tracing runtime flows, analyzing PR blast radius, and verifying generated code, with a strict evidence ledger and real end-to-end examples against DuckDB and vLLM included.
What it can do
- Map a large codebase into components with a focused reading route
- Trace runtime flows as falsifiable causal paths
- Assess PR impact with explicit source, runtime, inferred, or unknown labels
Setup
git clone https://github.com/Data-System-School/agent-skills.git
cp -r agent-skills/investigate-codebase ~/.claude/skills/
Or symlink it so git pull updates the installed skill
Prerequisites
Claude Code or OpenAI Codex
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 6/10
Scored 6/10 (metrics tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Evidence-backed codebase investigation skill (10 stars, MIT) from Data-System-School; modes and install verified from the README on 2026-10-13.; Eight real end-to-end example runs against DuckDB and vLLM, including failed checks — an honest evaluation standard.; Single-skill repo; deliberately read-only unless asked otherwise, which is a strength for audits but limits hands-on fixes.. License: MIT per GitHub license field..
★ 10 GitHub stars
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 4.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 5.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 9.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 7.0/10
- · Evidence-backed codebase investigation skill (10 stars, MIT) from Data-System-School; modes and install verified from the README on 2026-10-13.
- · Eight real end-to-end example runs against DuckDB and vLLM, including failed checks — an honest evaluation standard.
- · Single-skill repo; deliberately read-only unless asked otherwise, which is a strength for audits but limits hands-on fixes.
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.