Solidify: a codebase you can walk through

Some codebases you read. Others you wish you could walk through — follow a feature from the import that pulls it in, to the comment that explains it, to the code that does the work. That's the itch Solidify scratches, and it's out now.

What it does

Solidify is a Dart command-line tool that translates source code between languages by generalizing it first. Instead of a brittle line-by-line transpile, it lifts a codebase into three layers — comments, imports, and code — and turns the whole thing into a mind-map you can open and explore in Obsidian.

The result is a graph of your project you can actually navigate: what depends on what, where a concept lives, how a feature threads through the files.

Why I built it

I kept wanting to understand unfamiliar repos the way I understand a level layout — spatially, all at once — instead of scrolling one file at a time. Generalizing to that middle layer turned out to be the useful trick: it's high-level enough to see the shape, concrete enough to jump back to the code.

Get it

Solidify is on GitHub — HexaJohn/solidify. It's a Dart CLI, so if you have the SDK you can run it today.

More devlog posts coming as I keep sharpening the tools I build for myself.