Sourcegraph Cody — AI Code Intelligence for Understanding and Navigating Large Codebases
Meta Description Sourcegraph Cody is an AI-powered code intelligence assistant designed to help developers understand, search, and refactor large codebases. This article explores how Cody works, its strengths in real-world engineering environments, its limitations, and how it differs from traditional AI coding assistants. Introduction As software systems scale, the hardest part of development is no longer writing new code—it is understanding existing code. Engineers joining mature projects often spend weeks navigating unfamiliar repositories, tracing dependencies, and answering questions like: Where is this logic implemented? What depends on this function? Why was this design chosen? What breaks if I change this? Traditional IDEs and search tools help, but they operate at the level of files and text. They do not explain intent, history, or system-wide relationships. This gap has created demand for tools that focus not on generating new code, but on making large cod...