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Show HN: Nogic – VS Code extension that visualizes your codebase as a graph (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com)

134 points by davelradindra 6 days ago | 53 comments | View on ycombinator

pentaphobe 6 days ago |

All the GitHub links on your extension page are borked (including issues)

From the look of the associated domain it looks like you're going full product, best of luck

I'm a huge proponent of graph & visual analysis of complex systems - would have loved to try this out, but will always skip closed source editor extensions (especially in the age of widespread npm supply chain attacks & vibe coding)

vmware508 6 days ago |

I guess it is still useless in Ruby or Ruby on Rails. Standard "find the method declaration" or "used here" do not work in Ruby on Rails. Still, huge companies maintain that Ruby on Rails mess, where you cannot properly investigate, so you just guess and use the search and find option. Those codebases won't be replaced for a while, but good luck working on them. Such a headache!

doc_ick about 18 hours ago |

I like the looks of it, but until it's open-sourced, it'll be a nope for me. As it seems like they've had their website up since late last year but no code up.

bulletsvshumans 6 days ago |

Please publish to Open VSX so it is easily available for VS Code forks like Cursor as well.

tiborsaas 6 days ago |

I've tried it, but it's very slow on a not too complex codebase with my M3 Macbook Air.

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Language             Files        Lines        Blank      Comment         Code
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Typescript JSX         121        18724         1699         1051        15974
     TypeScript              61         5389          629          550         4210
     CSS                      5         1039           50           22          967
     Markdown                 3          657          173            0          484
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It was like 5-10FPS at best, not really usable unfortunately because I like these tools.

I'm using another similar one which is buttery smooth, Code Canvas.

everlier 6 days ago |

Nice, I wanted to build something similar for a long time. The coolest thing is to start summarising clusters for very large codebases, which essentially provides an LoD system for the context.

oersted 6 days ago |

Looks great, it was actually just playing around yesterday with `code canvas app` which is similar, and also Charkoal.dev and Haystack Editor (before code-review pivot) which are related. Yours looks better than any of them already!

I wish it was available in Cursor as well though. Not sure how exactly they manage their marketplace, most VSCode extensions seem to be there but now and then I encounter one that is missing for no apparent reason.

puppycodes 6 days ago |

I definitly think more tools like this are needed, but not open sourcing it is a mistake.

You will be quickly replaced by a friendlier competitor.

nebula8804 6 days ago |

Very cool visualization. However it crashes on a more complex project. I added a folder with 2000+ files(included my assets) and now the visualizer locks up then shows nothing on its tab in VSCode. How do I manually delete old boards so that I can try again with a smaller slice of the code(without assets)?

Imustaskforhelp 6 days ago |

Funny how world is so tiny. I am literally building myself an vscode extension which can abstract an api on top of google colab's vscode extension and I am able to effectively create a sandbox for any python code (I mean to be fair they all still share the same resource but that resource is of google)

I have also hacked together a way for it to create new kernels aka new vm's itself but that becomes really really slow and also I am trying to look at other options to sandbox inside the jupyter notebook itself.

The end result was very messy though so I was literally just currently experimenting with if I could just scrape/automate it from the browser directly.

All in All I must admit that Vscode extensions are/feel very quite competent from what I can gather.

patabyte 6 days ago |

I've been having great success with LLMs generating Mermaid diagrams and flowcharts from a repo. Claude Code and Cursor both do consistently great jobs. For example: `generate a mermaid swimlanes diagram of the XX logic flow`.

fpauser 6 days ago |

Closed source vscode extensions: not for me.

fishgoesblub 6 days ago |

Unfortunately the repository links are broken and this is ARR licensed.

kelsolaar 6 days ago |

Quite enjoying the idea as I have been looking for something like this for a while but it is reallllllly slow for our medium sized codebase, I have like 2 or 3 fps on my M1: https://github.com/colour-science/colour/tree/develop/colour

aqula 5 days ago |

Really cool! I'm also dabbling with this idea. The biggest challenge I find is to reduce noise. Large codebases come with a lot of cruft. Surfacing every small detail in the visualization tends to make it messy and less useful. I've not seen contemporary tools tackle this, but think can be useful.

wek 6 days ago |

From your first page, this looks cool and needed. But as others have posted, I can't get to your github pages.

apem 5 days ago |

Super cool! I've thought of literally this so many times.

Is there any way to add a file to a board, then "explore" the imports of that file and potentially adding those files as well? I'm thinking as a way to explore a code base better.

Best of luck :)

Aspos 6 days ago |

The illustration gif is way too fast. Hard to understand what is going on. Slow it down 2x or so.

suprjami 6 days ago |

Only JS, TypeScript, and Python. You got me all excited for a C visualizer!

kachapopopow 6 days ago |

I always liked the idea having relationship based programming (graph programming), but with actual code. Never actually made the effort to make something like that. Pretty neat either way.

Scene_Cast2 6 days ago |

I used to use Doxygen to create caller and callee graphs to understand code flow. Unfortunately, the tool hasn't really changed in more than a decade.

undefined 6 days ago |

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amd64 5 days ago |

Recommend Lumyst - lumystai.com

dolevalgam 6 days ago |

This is incredibly needed!!

matiszz 6 days ago |

This is incredibly useful!

frmfrm 5 days ago |

Very nice!