So there I was. A GSoC project I actually wanted to work on.
Cloned the repo. Opened VS Code.
Hundreds of files. Thousands of functions. Zero context.
I tried grepping. I tried scrolling. I opened random files hoping something would click.
Nothing clicked.
The problem wasn't skill. It was orientation.
I knew how to write code. I didn't know this code.
There's no onboarding doc that tells you: "function A calls function B which depends on module C." You're supposed to figure that out. Manually. By reading everything.
That's not how I work. That's probably not how you work either.
So instead of contributing to that project, I started building something else.
What if the codebase could explain itself?
Not an AI that hallucinates what your code does. Something that actually reads it. Parses it. Maps every function, every call, every dependency statically.
No guessing. No LLM making things up. Just: here's what exists, here's what calls what.
That became N3MO.
What it actually does
You point it at a repo. It indexes everything.
Django's 3,021 files indexed in ~2.5 minutes. 43,000+ symbols. 181,000+ call edges.
Every function knows what calls it. Every module knows what it imports. You can ask "where is this used?" and get an actual answer, not a guess.
It ships as a PyPI package, a GitHub App, an MCP server that works inside Cursor and Claude Desktop, and a REST API. All from the same engine.
The GSoC project I never contributed to
I never sent that PR.
But the problem it gave me turned into something I'm still building a year later.
Sometimes the codebase you can't understand is more valuable than the one you can.
Try it: pip install n3mo or n3mo.shop