Alternatives
Products that do what Xkcd #2347 lived in my head, so I built the dependency tower for real does
I finally got tired of XKCD #2347 living rent-free in my head, so I built Stacktower: a tool that takes any real package’s dependency graph and turns it into an actual tower of bricks. Along the way I had to wrestle some surprisingly spicy problems. Full blog post here: https://stacktower.io The result is half visualization tool, half love letter to the chaos of modern dependency trees. Open-source, works with PyPI, Cargo, npm, and more. Code: https://github.com/matzehuels/stacktower
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Hi HN! I'm Gabriel, the author of dep-tree (https://github.com/gabotechs/dep-tree), and I wanted to show off this tool and explain why it's being really useful at my current org for dealing with code complexity. I work at a startup where business evolves really fast, and requirements change frequently, so it's easy to end up with big piles of code stacked together without a clear structure, specially with tight deadlines. I made dep-tree [1] to help us maintain a clean code architecture and a logical separation of concerns between parts of the application, which is…
2024 · github.com
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2014 · stackshare.io
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I believe the best way to learn a language is by doing an in-depth project. This is my first Zig project intended for learning the ropes on publishing a Zig package. It turns out to be quite solid and performant. It might be a bit over-engineered. This little library is packed with the following features: - Building dependency graph from dependency data. - Performing topological sort on the dependency graph. - Generating dependence-free subsets for parallel processing. - Cycle detection and cycle reporting.
2025 · github.com
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Hey Everybody! Hope you had a merry christmas Today I had a bit of fun with Claude. Started by scraping YC's startups list, then ran them through OpenAI's embedding service, then UMAP'd the embedding to reduce the dimension to just two coordinates and then just forced Claude to write React that would compile to visualize that. I had fun and I think it's interesting, so take a look! Also note that you won't be able to zoom on mobile (found about this Plotly limitation way too late). If there's interest I can fix this issue by changing plotting libs tomorrow :) Merry christmas
2024 · yc-map.vercel.app
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This is a project I've wanted to write for a long time now. I really love the ideas from Nix and I still have a ton of respect for the project, but Nix-the-language never felt intuitive to me and I wanted something with more approachable tooling (although this was circa 2016, so I'm sure Nix has improved a lot since then too-- that was before Flakes were around!) Anyway, I started on the current iteration of Brioche about 6 months ago, and I finally cut an initial release. I'd still consider this a "technical preview" version (performance especially is pretty painful, so that'll be a focus…
2024 · brioche.dev
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2014 · diffmatic.com
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2017 · github.com
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Hello Hacker News, this is Ashish. We started building Stackdome in 2024 as a hobby project. The idea was to package the tooling in the CNCF/cloud-native ecosystem into an opinionated platform, so that developers can get a well engineered platform without learning Kubernetes YAMLology or a dozen other projects from the CNCF landscape. Railway and Render did this well for their hosted products. I wanted to bring that level of polish and DX to something you can self-host. Stackdome uses Kubernetes underneath, but it's completely transparent to users. (I have some ideas for an expert mode…
24d ago · stackdome.com
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Hi all, I'm Ivan, and together with Alex, we're building a diagram visualization tool for codebases. Alex and I are devs, and we've noticed that recently we've been super productive at writing code (prompting :D). But when it comes to understanding big systems, prompting doesn't work that well — for that, diagrams are best imo. Most tools out there don't scale to big projects (e.g. PyTorch), so we're building CodeBoarding — a recursive visualizer for codebases. It starts from the highest level of abstractions and lets you dive deeper. We use static analysis and LLM agents. The control-flow…
2025 · github.com
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This project addresses the inefficiencies of traditional Dockerfile-based container builds where each customization layer creates storage bloat through duplicate dependencies from repeated apt-get install commands, network inefficiency from redundant package downloads across different images, and slow iteration cycles requiring full rebuilds of all previous steps. Our solution enables building minimal base images from scratch using debootstrap that precisely include only required components in the initial build, while allowing creation of specialized variants (Java, Kafka, etc.) from these…
2025 · github.com
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Hello all, Very excited to share this project with you all! Panoptisch scans your Python file or module to find it's imports (aka dependencies) and recursively does so for all dependencies and sub-dependencies. It then generates a dependency tree in JSON for you to parse and enforce import policies. Supply chain attacks are no joke, and this is one way to transparently analyze your dependencies to see if any malicious imports are taking place. For example, your yaml parser, nor it's sub-dependencies should import socket, or sys. Panoptisch is in early stages, with known limitations (for…
2022 · github.com
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I built a CLI tool that turns codebases and PRs into diagrams so you can quickly understand how things fit together. Originally made it because I couldn't follow my own AI-generated repos. Just shipped a big update: - Switched from D2 to Mermaid for rendering - Tree-sitter AST parsing + agentic flow instead of raw LLM calls. ~50x faster. - Works on any GitHub repo or PR, not just local - Dropped the web frontend, it's just a CLI now - Published as a pip package Still a ton to improve and I'm building fast. Feedback, issues, PRs all welcome.
Feb 2026 · github.com
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I've been using LLMs for long discovery and research chats (papers, repos, best practices), then distilling that into phased markdown (build plan + tests), then handing those phases to Codex/Claude to implement and test phase by phase. The annoying part was always the distillation and keeping docs and architecture current, so I built Unpack: a lightweight GitHub template plus docs structure and a few commands that turns conversations into phases/specs and keeps project docs up to date as the agent builds. It can also generate Mintlify-friendly end-user docs. There are other…
Feb 2026 · github.com
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2013 · hughsk.github.io
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Hi HN, I built Hypermod to help developers automate large-scale code migrations. If you've ever had to upgrade dependencies, refactor thousands of files, or apply the same fix across multiple repos, you know how painful and time-consuming it can be. Hypermod makes this process faster and more reliable by combining static analysis, AI-powered codemods, and GitHub automation. Why I Built This I've spent years working with large codebases where upgrading dependencies or migrating frameworks was a nightmare—lots of manual work, brittle scripts, and coordination across teams. Existing tools like…
2025 · hypermod.io
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Title says all that needs to said about it, admittedly it is stupid to "copy" any Windows feature in Linux but here we are...it is not exactly made for use by extensive audience but just a rough work of it would love any suggestion/critique on it ...
2025 · github.com
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Jan 2026 · github.com
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2012 · aaronparecki.com
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I worked as a software engineer at Amazon, SAP, and on open source. In all 3 places I have struggled with the friction of understanding codebases before I can make a contribution. I think this brain-fatiguing process can be improved. I am trying to solve it with a tool I built over the last 4 years called CodeCanvas: https://docs.code-canvas.com CodeCanvas visualizes codebases through interactive diagrams linked directly to source code. Users can record 'simulations' to demonstrate data flow and business logic. I’ve also recently added an LLM chat where it takes only the relevant…
2025 · pie-crepe-38f.notion.site
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Myself and three friends, for the last year have been building our own side project, the aim of this side project was to show off the creative side of developers. One of my bug bears with Reddit is how quickly things get buried. The bug bear has turned into the basis for what I been building on the side called The Full Stack. A platform to show off developer projects basically. Another bug bear of mine over the years has been trying to find open source or just cool side projects to work on with others, and even find teams to join. So that's another thing we've built, an easy way to find…
2023 · thefullstack.network
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Hey HN, We’re excited to share PySpur, an open-source tool that provides a graph-based interface for building, debugging, and evaluating LLM workflows. Why we built this: Before this, we built several LLM-powered applications that collectively served thousands of users. The biggest challenge we faced was ensuring reliability: making sure the workflows were robust enough to handle edge cases and deliver consistent results. In practice, achieving this reliability meant repeatedly: 1. Breaking down complex goals into simpler steps: Composing prompts, tool calls, parsing steps, and branching…
2024 · github.com
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