why

To find why a file exists, you can surface governing decisions, tied intents, and recent edit history. This reveals the context and rationale behind code, helping teams avoid re-debating changes during reviews or refactors.

Tracing intent behind recent code edits involves surfacing the intents that touched a file or symbol. This process links historical decisions and the 20 most recent edits to provide a snapshot of author and summary context.

Code history tracing requires access to fstack brain data. The process reads decisions linked to target files, tied intents, and recent edits from this data source to output the historical context in plain text.

To surface architecture decision records and intents linked to a specific file, you run a command targeting the file path. This retrieves linked ADRs, intents, and recent edits to provide immediate rationale for code audits.

You can use this approach to understand code rationale during debugging and reviews. It applies specifically to code audits and refactoring, providing the context needed to understand decisions and recent edits around symbols.

A limitation of using recent edit history is that it only surfaces the 20 most recent edits with author and summary. It relies entirely on available fstack brain data and does not infer rationale when decisions are not explicitly linked.