Codebase Onboarding Agent: New Engineer Ready in Hours, Not Weeks

**TL;DR:** Read your codebase, generate an interactive onboarding map, identify the high-leverage files every new engineer needs to read first — all from a single CLI command.

The 10-Second Pitch

• **What it is:** A codebase analysis agent that produces an interactive onboarding guide from a git repo.
• **Who it's for:** Engineering managers, platform teams, any org with onboarding debt.
• **Why it matters:** Onboarding friction compounds. Every engineer who takes 2 weeks instead of 2 days to become productive is a tax on team output.
• **Stack:** Node.js, reads git history and source files.

Setup Directions

Prerequisites

• Node.js >= 18
• A git repo with at least 50 commits

Step 1 - Install

```bash

npm install @mrtech/codebase-onboarding --save-dev

```

Step 2 - Generate

```bash

npx codebase-onboarding generate --repo ./ --out ./onboarding/

```

Step 3 - Open Dashboard

```bash

npx codebase-onboarding serve --port 3002

```

Pros / Cons

| Dimension | Rating | Notes |

|-----------|--------|-------|

| Speed | 5/5 | Full map in under 2 minutes |

| File Ranking | 4/5 | Git history + AST analysis surfaces key files |

| Interactive Output | 4/5 | HTML dashboard with navigable dependency graph |

Verdict

Codebase Onboarding addresses onboarding debt directly. The dependency graph visualization alone is worth the install. Re-run it quarterly or after major refactors.

Skill: codebase-onboarding | Ecosystem: claude-code | Runtime: node | Auth: api-key