/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description: DEPRECATED — superseded by tree-sitting.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](../tree-sitting/SKILL.md) 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](https://github.com/oaustegard/claude-skills/releases/tag/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.