Building Astra

Astra is a conversational CLI for codebase analysis and autonomous refactoring. It's the tool I wished existed when I started working on large codebases — something that could understand your code semantically and help you reshape it.

The idea came from frustration. Every time I joined a new project, I spent days just reading code, trying to understand how everything connected. I thought: what if a tool could do that for me?

Astra works by building a persistent, local memory of your codebase. It parses your code across multiple languages, understands the relationships between modules, and lets you have a conversation about your code instead of just searching through it.

The hardest part has been making it fast. Parsing thousands of files, indexing them, and keeping everything in sync as the codebase changes — that's where Rust comes in. The core engine is built in Rust for performance, with a Node.js layer on top for the conversational interface.

Astra is still early. But every time I use it on a real project and it saves me hours of manual work, I know I'm building something worth finishing.