Code Browser in the AI Era — sunerpy/codegraph-rust

Yeah, the AI era is coming! Meanwhile, I still need to refresh my knowledge base—and my AI token budget is limited for all sorts of reasons.

AI-assisted coding (or, as some people call it, slop programming) is becoming very popular, at least in China. Perhaps one reason is that the cost is much lower there.

I’ve been trying a skills repositorie(and a mirror) to help port Qt applications from Qt 5.15 to Qt 6 and fix failing automated tests. I’m also planning to start working on some skills of my own.

Today, I came across an answer on Zhihu that mentioned codegraph-rust in the context of Java projects. I asked ChatGPT, “codegraph-rust kind of thing for C++ and Qt?” The answer pointed me to the same project—and, more importantly, confirmed that C and C++ are explicitly supported.

I decided to give it a try on macOS 26 (Tahoe).

Install and run

Install CodeGraph:

Then index Qt’s qtbase source tree and open the browser UI:

And there you have it: a code browser for the AI era.

What can you explore?

CodeGraph builds a local graph of the code structure, so you can navigate and investigate a project in several ways. Among other things, you can:

• explore symbols and their source code;
• search for code and definitions;
• find callers and callees;
• inspect the potential impact of changing a symbol;
• follow relationships across a large codebase.

The project describes its analysis as deterministic: the indexer itself does not rely on an LLM or vector search. That makes it an interesting companion to AI coding tools—a way to inspect code relationships directly rather than asking a model to rediscover them from scratch every time.

I’ve only just started trying it with Qt’s source tree, so this is a first impression rather than a full review. I’ll explore it further and see how useful it is for everyday Qt development.

References