🚀 Built: GitLab Knowledge Navigator
Over the last week, I've been building GitLab Knowledge Navigator for the GitLab AI Hackathon 2026.
The idea started from a common developer problem:
You join a project, open an issue, and suddenly need to understand years of architecture decisions, merge requests, dependencies, ownership history, and code relationships.
The information exists, but it's scattered everywhere.
GitLab Knowledge Navigator transforms GitLab Orbit's knowledge graph into actionable repository intelligence.
Demo Video:- https://youtu.be/xLBaZ2sFMEI
🔍 What it can do:
• New Contributor Onboarding
• Architecture Memory
• Decision Intelligence
• Change Impact Analysis
• Architecture Drift Detection
• Repository Risk Alerts
• Executive Engineering Reports
• Knowledge Graph Visualization
• Repository Intelligence Scoring
One of the most interesting capabilities is the ability to answer questions such as:
"Why does this dependency exist?"
Instead of giving a generic AI answer, Navigator traces real repository history through GitLab Orbit and explains when a technology was introduced, why it was added, and which merge request introduced it.
🏗 Technical Highlights
• GitLab Orbit API
• Orbit Local Graph (DuckDB)
• Gemini 2.5 Flash
• Python
• Knowledge Graph Traversal
• Multi-Repository Analysis
• Interactive HTML Dashboards
The project was validated not only on its own codebase but also on a fork of GitLab Runner containing:
✅ 1,366 files
✅ 9,314 definitions
✅ 58,340 indexed relationships
One of the biggest lessons from this project was that repository intelligence requires more than an LLM. The real value comes from combining AI with structured repository knowledge and software development lifecycle context.
From Code → Context → Decisions.
