{"slug": "tessera-code-analysis-with-a-versioned-knowledge-graph", "title": "Tessera: Code Analysis with a Versioned Knowledge Graph", "summary": "Tessera, an open-source tool from developer Rcarubbi, builds a versioned knowledge graph of codebases using tree-sitter for deterministic static analysis and AI only for summarization, enabling incremental processing and time-travel queries. The tool, available at github.com/rcarubbi/tessera, offers a dashboard and a fully offline binary that runs the same pipeline without AI or database, supporting CI validation and local Markdown reports.", "body_md": "Analyzing code is more than reading file after file. You want to understand the architecture: who calls whom, what the hidden dependencies are, what breaks if a function changes, whether a new PR violates project rules. Those answers don’t live in any single file — they live in the relationships *between* files.\n\nThat’s what drove **Tessera**: connect a Git repository and it builds a **versioned knowledge graph** of your codebase. Classes, interfaces, methods, calls, dependencies — all mapped. And the important part: every *commit* produces an immutable snapshot. You can ask “what breaks if I change X?” at any version of the code.\n\nThe first temptation in a project like this is to dump the whole repository into an LLM and ask it to “understand.” Spoiler: that doesn’t work well. Models hallucinate structure, invent relationships that don’t exist, and you lose trust in the entire system.\n\nTessera does the opposite. **tree-sitter** (static AST analysis) is the source of truth, at ~1.0 confidence. It decides what exists: classes, methods, inheritance, calls, dependencies. AI only comes in afterwards, to summarize and infer semantics — on top of a structure already decided deterministically.\n\nThe result: useful descriptions, but always correct structure.\n\nEvery graph node has two hashes:\n\nThis gives true **incremental** processing. Five files changed in a 10,000-file repository?\n\nThe AI processes 5 nodes, not the monolith. And because snapshots are immutable and content-addressed, every query is “time-travel”: architectural diffs between versions, versioned queries, no global state to manage.\n\nThe dashboard becomes a toolbox for analysis:\n\nNot everyone wants to spin up Docker just to analyze a codebase. The tessera binary runs the same parse → summarize → link → graph pipeline, but **100% offline**: no database, no API, no AI, no upload. It only needs the .NET runtime, git, and the parsing sidecar.\n\nThat means: architecture rules validated in CI, Markdown reports generated locally, and the same results as the dashboard — because it reuses the same rule engine and the same graph algorithms.\n\nOpen source, with a spec-driven development history documented along the way. If you want to understand the architecture of a codebase before touching it — including your own — take a look here: [https://github.com/rcarubbi/tessera](https://github.com/rcarubbi/tessera)\n\n[Tessera: Code Analysis with a Versioned Knowledge Graph](https://blog.stackademic.com/tessera-code-analysis-with-a-versioned-knowledge-graph-99e1ea30568f) was originally published in [Stackademic](https://blog.stackademic.com) on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/tessera-code-analysis-with-a-versioned-knowledge-graph", "canonical_source": "https://blog.stackademic.com/tessera-code-analysis-with-a-versioned-knowledge-graph-99e1ea30568f?source=rss----d1baaa8417a4---4", "published_at": "2026-08-14 08:07:26+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-14 08:20:04.846452+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "ai-tools", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["Tessera", "tree-sitter", "Rcarubbi", "Stackademic", "Medium", "Git", ".NET", "Docker"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/tessera-code-analysis-with-a-versioned-knowledge-graph", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/tessera-code-analysis-with-a-versioned-knowledge-graph.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/tessera-code-analysis-with-a-versioned-knowledge-graph.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/tessera-code-analysis-with-a-versioned-knowledge-graph.jsonld"}}