ripwire
A zero-dependency C++ command-line tool and MCP server that maps a codebase for an AI coding agent before it reads the repository, then checks a proposed edit's blast radius, the tests that reach it and where its quality got worse.
ripwire builds a ranked, deterministic call graph of a codebase so an AI coding agent can find what it needs to touch without reading the whole repository first, described by its own README as "the ripgrep of AI context." It also checks a change after it is made: what it might break, which tests reach the changed code, and a set of quality signals that report only what got worse, such as forgotten related changes and fields or names that resolve ambiguously.
It installs as a single command-line binary plus an MCP server, and is meant to be invoked by telling an agent to use it at the start of a coding session; the install also teaches the agent when to use each command. Symbol signatures are reported instead of full bodies to use noticeably fewer tokens than reading source directly.
Its design work is documented against a lineage of software-engineering research spanning about fifty years, including established results such as McCabe's complexity metric and Halstead's volume metric, alongside recent papers on retrieval and context management for coding agents, with a separate published survey of tools that were tried and found not to contribute a lesson.