Proprietary Live

Code Compass

Semantic code intelligence for AI agents, from modern stacks to decades of COBOL.

  • MCP
  • Static analysis
  • COBOL & JCL
  • Multi-language
Website

The problem

An AI agent is only as good as the context it gets. Left to grep, it gets hundreds of hits across strings, comments and dead code, and burns its context window on the wrong files. In the enterprise the problem is sharper. Core systems run on millions of lines of COBOL. The engineers who understand them are retiring, business rules are buried in undocumented code, and new people need a year or more to become productive. Knowledge walks out of the door with every departure.

What it does

Code Compass gives agents and engineers IDE-grade understanding of a codebase: where a symbol is defined, who actually calls it, what a change would touch. It answers in milliseconds, with every reference classified as a read, write or call rather than matched as text.

  • Agentic coding. Agents work from the code’s real structure instead of searching for it.
  • Safe change. The full blast radius of a change is known before the pull request, not after CI breaks.
  • Documentation and business rules. Agents walk the call graph to document programs and extract the business rules hidden in them.
  • Onboarding. Newcomers query the system instead of queueing for the one senior who knows it.

How it works

Code Compass builds a digital twin of the codebase, locally: nothing leaves the machine. Agents, engineers and CI query the twin through local MCP tools instead of searching the source. In a modernization programme it is the first step. Start with documentation, the ask the client already has, and each phase builds on the one before.

The hard part

Precision. A tool that returns every file mentioning a name is just grep with extra steps. Classifying each reference by what it actually does, and keeping the twin fresh as the code changes underneath an agent, is what turns “300 hits” into “the 12 real callers”. It has to hold for decades-old COBOL just as well as for a modern service.

Where it stands

In use, including in mainframe modernization work. Code Compass is proprietary. I built it for Itera, and its capabilities are available only through Itera, on their own or as part of the platform with Atlas Data Fabric and Digital Factory.