Analyze mode
Get oriented in an unfamiliar repository
The first day in a new repository is spent building a mental model. Ask and Analyze are read-only, so you can interrogate the project aggressively with no risk of it editing anything.
How to run it
- 01Open the repository root and wait for the index.
- 02Run Analyze for an architecture overview.
- 03Use Ask for specific questions: where requests enter, how auth works, what owns the database schema.
- 04Ask it to trace one real request end to end. That is usually the moment it clicks.
Use a general model, not a coder
Explanation is a different skill from code generation. Qwen2.5 14B or Gemma 3 12B explain better than the same-size coder models, which are tuned to emit code.
Read-only means read-only
Ask and Analyze cannot write files. You can point them at a client's repository without worrying about accidental edits.