assessing-impact

Pre-change blast-radius reports for a symbol or file in a local codebase. Walks the tree-sitting AST cache for direct references, augments with a plain-text scan over file types tree-sitting doesn't parse, and clusters affected sites by package, tests, docs, and (when present) _FEATURES.md features.

Features

• Symbol or file targets — identify what breaks if you change validateUser or refactor auth.py
• AST-aware ref discovery — uses tree-sitting's parsed corpus, excluding definition lines so refs are uses, not declarations
• Non-AST text scan — picks up Dockerfile, .ini, .env, .properties, plain .txt/.rst references that the AST scanner misses
• Three-axis clustering — code-by-package, tests, and docs, with optional _FEATURES.md overlay
• Test surface suggestion — surfaces tests that already reference the target plus tests neighboring the definition
• No opinionated risk score — structured report is input for the LLM that writes the final summary
• Substring-fallback warning — flags when the target had no exact match so the resulting noise is visible
• Markdown or JSON output

Dependency

Requires the tree-sitting skill — imports engine.py directly and uses its bundled grammars.

Relationship to Other Skills

• exploring-codebases — divergent first-encounter EDA; run before assessing-impact if the repo also needs an _FEATURES.md
• searching-codebases — convergent "where is X" search; complementary, not a replacement for impact analysis
• tree-sitting — drill into specific call sites once impact has identified them
• featuring — produces the _FEATURES.md files that assessing-impact overlays for feature-area clustering

Honest Limits

Text-based ref discovery, no type/MRO resolution, no cross-language or cross-repo tracing, no persistent index. For deep ongoing impact analysis on a daily codebase, GitNexus or SourceGraph remain the right tool. This skill is for the ad-hoc case: "I'm about to refactor X in a repo I don't own, what should I be careful about?"

Skill folder: assessing-impact

Release of assessing-impact version 0.1.1

📥 Download & Install

⬇️ Download assessing-impact.zip

To install:

1. Click the download link above (ignore the "Source code" archives below - they're auto-generated by GitHub)
2. Go to Claude.ai Skills Settings
3. Upload the downloaded ZIP file
4. Requires paid Claude Pro or Team account

See official documentation for more details.

Recent Changes

8fbb9be assessing-impact: add README, bump to 0.1.1 (#582)
8e1e4b0 docs: Update CHANGELOG.md for released skills