[HN Gopher] Show HN: Nogic - VS Code extension that visualizes y...
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       Show HN: Nogic - VS Code extension that visualizes your codebase as
       a graph
        
       I built Nogic, a VSCode extension currently, because AI tools make
       code grow faster than developers can build a mental model by
       jumping between files. Exploring structure visually has been
       helping me onboard to unfamiliar codebases faster.  It's early and
       rough, but usable. Would love feedback on whether this is useful
       and what relationships are most valuable to visualize.
        
       Author : davelradindra
       Score  : 44 points
       Date   : 2026-01-13 18:43 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (marketplace.visualstudio.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (marketplace.visualstudio.com)
        
       | everlier wrote:
       | Nice, I wanted to build something similar for a long time. The
       | coolest thing is to start summarising clusters for very large
       | codebases, which essentially provides an LoD system for the
       | context.
        
       | pentaphobe wrote:
       | All the GitHub links on your extension page are borked (including
       | issues)
       | 
       | From the look of the associated domain it looks like you're going
       | full product, best of luck
       | 
       | I'm a huge proponent of graph & visual analysis of complex
       | systems - would have loved to try this out, but will always skip
       | closed source editor extensions (especially in the age of
       | widespread npm supply chain attacks & vibe coding)
        
       | Aspos wrote:
       | The illustration gif is way too fast. Hard to understand what is
       | going on. Slow it down 2x or so.
        
       | wek wrote:
       | From your first page, this looks cool and needed. But as others
       | have posted, I can't get to your github pages.
        
       | fpauser wrote:
       | Closed source vscode extensions: not for me.
        
       | fishgoesblub wrote:
       | Unfortunately the repository links are broken and this is ARR
       | licensed.
        
       | nebula8804 wrote:
       | Very cool visualization. However it crashes on a more complex
       | project. I added a folder with 2000+ files(included my assets)
       | and now the visualizer locks up then shows nothing on its tab in
       | VSCode. How do I manually delete old boards so that I can try
       | again with a smaller slice of the code(without assets)?
        
       | Imustaskforhelp wrote:
       | Funny how world is so tiny. I am literally building myself an
       | vscode extension which can abstract an api on top of google
       | colab's vscode extension and I am able to effectively create a
       | sandbox for any python code (I mean to be fair they all still
       | share the same resource but that resource is of google)
       | 
       | I have also hacked together a way for it to create new kernels
       | aka new vm's itself but that becomes really really slow and also
       | I am trying to look at other options to sandbox inside the
       | jupyter notebook itself.
       | 
       | The end result was very messy though so I was literally just
       | currently experimenting with if I could just scrape/automate it
       | from the browser directly.
       | 
       | All in All I must admit that Vscode extensions are/feel very
       | quite competent from what I can gather.
        
       | patabyte wrote:
       | I've been having great success with LLMs generating Mermaid
       | diagrams and flowcharts from a repo. Claude Code and Cursor both
       | do consistently great jobs. For example: `generate a mermaid
       | swimlanes diagram of the XX logic flow`.
        
       | vmware508 wrote:
       | I guess it is still useless in Ruby or Ruby on Rails. Standard
       | "find the method declaration" or "used here" do not work in Ruby
       | on Rails. Still, huge companies maintain that Ruby on Rails mess,
       | where you cannot properly investigate, so you just guess and use
       | the search and find option. Those codebases won't be replaced for
       | a while, but good luck working on them. Such a headache!
        
         | TheRoque wrote:
         | How come nobody came up with an LSP that can perform this, all
         | this time ?
        
           | esafak wrote:
           | https://shopify.github.io/ruby-lsp/rails-add-on#go-to-
           | defini... ?
        
           | IshKebab wrote:
           | Because it's an unsolvable problem without static type
           | annotations and as far as I'm aware Ruby doesn't have a good
           | solution for those yet (or if they do nobody uses it).
        
       | suprjami wrote:
       | Only JS, TypeScript, and Python. You got me all excited for a C
       | visualizer!
        
       | puppycodes wrote:
       | I definitly think more tools like this are needed, but not open
       | sourcing it is a mistake.
       | 
       | You will be quickly replaced by a friendlier competitor.
        
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       (page generated 2026-01-13 23:00 UTC)