mapping-codebases
DEPRECATED — superseded by tree-sitting. This skill generated persistent _MAP.md files; tree-sitting does the same AST extraction at runtime (~700ms for 250 files) with no artifact to write, commit, or keep in sync. Use tree-sitting for "map this codebase", "explore repo", "understand structure", or any code navigation task. The final working version is archived at release mapping-codebases-v0.8.0.
How do I install this agent skill?
npx skills add https://github.com/oaustegard/claude-skills --skill mapping-codebasesIs this agent skill safe to install?
- Gen Agent Trust Hubwarn
The skill generates codebase maps but includes functionality to download and execute binary parser libraries from an external, unvetted GitHub repository. It also processes untrusted source code, which presents an indirect prompt injection risk if the extracted metadata is used to influence the agent.
- Socketpass
No alerts
- Snykfail
Risk: HIGH · 2 issues
- Runlayerwarn
3/7 files flagged
What does this agent skill do?
Mapping Codebases (deprecated)
Use tree-sitting instead.
Why
This skill wrote _MAP.md files to disk — a persisted symbol inventory per
directory, generated once and read many times. That tradeoff made sense when
scanning was expensive. It isn't: tree-sitting parses a 250-file repo in about
700ms and answers queries against the in-memory AST in under a millisecond.
A persisted map costs what a runtime scan does not — it goes stale, it needs regenerating, it gets committed, and it must be excluded from every other tool that walks the tree. Nothing was gained for that.
Replacement commands
TREESIT=/mnt/skills/user/tree-sitting/scripts/treesit.py
# Was: codemap.py /path/to/repo → root orientation
python3 $TREESIT /path/to/repo
# Was: reading every _MAP.md in the tree → full inventory
python3 $TREESIT /path/to/repo --depth=-1 --detail=sparse
# Was: grepping _MAP.md for a symbol → direct lookup
python3 $TREESIT /path/to/repo --no-tree 'find:parse_input'
The archived version
The last working release is
mapping-codebases-v0.8.0
(2026-03-31). It carries scripts/codemap.py and the eleven bundled
parsers/*.so grammars. The release is the snapshot; nothing in this directory
reproduces it.
Note that v0.8.0 ships a latent bug: codemap.py:1216 calls an unimported
get_parser() inside a try swallowed by a bare except Exception, so HTML
inline-JavaScript symbol extraction silently returned nothing. It will not be
fixed.
How can the creator link this skill?
Add the canonical catalog link to the repository README so users can inspect current installs and available audits. The publishing guide covers the complete discovery path.
<a href="https://skillzs.dev/skills/oaustegard/claude-skills/mapping-codebases">View mapping-codebases on skillZs</a>