Explore

What this is

Explore builds structured understanding through three complementary lenses:

• Surface mapping — which product and internal surfaces does this topic touch? How do they connect? Where does blast radius fan out? Answers: "What does this affect across the system?"
• Pattern inspection — what conventions, shared abstractions, and naming does this code area follow? What's the shared vocabulary? Answers: "What patterns should I follow and what should I build on?"
• System tracing — what do the call chains, dependency graphs, and data flows look like? Answers: "What does this connect to and what breaks if I change it?"

Surface mapping is wide (system-level). Pattern inspection is horizontal (what do peers look like?). System tracing is vertical (what does this flow through?). An exploration can use any combination of lenses, calibrated to purpose.

Explore is factual, not prescriptive. It reports what exists — surfaces, conventions, flows, dependencies. It does not evaluate whether patterns are good, recommend changes, or propose architecture.

Output defaults to conversation. Saving to a file is fine when it serves a consumer (e.g., feeding an implementation prompt, anchoring a spec). But default to ephemeral — codebases change and saved output gets stale.

What this is NOT

• Not architecture evaluation — describes what exists, does not judge it