Code insights

Quick Resources

Handbook Pages

Mission

To create a Sourcegraph code insights product that answers all your important high-level questions about what’s in your code and how it’s changing.

Vision

Sourcegraph users – especially those in leadership roles – create and monitor code insights to answer vital questions about their code, including:

  1. How their code is tracking against any migration, pattern, or code smell goals
  2. How their code is changing over time and what areas may need more or less developer attention
  3. Understanding their code’s current and historical content, like its languages, libraries, and structure
  4. What patterns or outliers exist in their third party tools’ data when viewed at a high level
  5. Any of the above questions, but also filtered by repository, engineering team, or other division

Responsibilities

The code insights team is responsible for all code insights features, both backend and frontend.

While code insights is in prototype stage, the code insights team is also responsible for all support.

What is code insights?

Code insights is the first feature in Sourcegraph that can tell you things about your code at a high level.

Code insights dashboards will answer questions like “How is a migration progressing?”, “What areas of the code are most vulnerable to bugs?”, and “How many developers are using a specific API?” Code insights will also incorporate third-party data like code coverage or static analysis metrics to deliver on the promise of aggregating everything you can know about your code.

Sourcegraph is in the unique position to give these insights because we have universal code search: to know anything about your code at a high level confidently means you must know everything about your code at a low level.

Code insights connects many features that Sourcegraph already has and builds on top of them. We go beyond single-step code intelligence and search to connect the full cycle of analyzing (code intelligence), monitoring (code insights), and actionably changing a codebase (batch changes).

Code insights is the first feature primarily built for non-search-based user personas (developers), instead focusing first on the needs of engineering directors and VPs.

For more information about code insights, see the original product document or this demo of a code insights prototype. Anyone on the Sourcegraph team can create your own insight using the quickstart guide, which is explicitly not in the Sourcegraph docs because code insights is undergoing rapid development and this setup will soon change.

Useful browser bookmarks ⭐️

The following bookmarks are useful to add to your browser’s bookmark bar if you’re on the code insights team. You can drag & drop these directly into your bookmarks bar.

History

In mid-2020, Code Insights was born out of RFC 144: Code Insights, with the stated goal of being a Sourcegraph feature directly valuable to users in engineering leadership, in addition to individual developers. It was prototyped solely on the frontend to validate strong customer interest.

In late 2020, after the initial validation, and using the frontend-only functional prototype, a product designer and newly-hired product manager developed a detailed validation of use cases, customer excitement, potential directions, and the existing spaces the product fit into. Those findings are in PD 18: Code Insights.

In early 2021, seeing continued validation and opportunity, Code Insights became its own team separate from the “web team” (now 2021’s Developer Insights org).

In mid-2021 we made the first engineering hires to grow Code Insights to a full engineering team and bring the product to market.