rederive

rederive is an agent skill by Eric Zou (GitHub: EricJujianZou). In the README's words, "rederive is a skill for coding agents that teaches you a codebase by making you design it yourself from first principles." Once it's installed, you point /rederive at the current codebase, a local path, or a Git URL. It analyzes the code structure, imports, and commit history, turns them into 5 to 10 design questions, and walks you through them with Socratic questioning until you work out why the project is built the way it is. Your progress is kept in .rederive/map.md and log.md inside the project. It only asks the questions; you reconstruct the design yourself, which is where it differs most from tools that explain code to you. It works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Copilot, and other tools that read Agent Skills.

Who it's for:Programmers taking over an unfamiliar codebase who want to understand why it was written that way. It is of no use if you don't write code.

Before you start: It needs git, bash, and python3. Given a Git URL, it clones the repository, and it may pull updates into a folder that already exists. It writes .rederive/map.md and .rederive/log.md in the project and edits .git/info/exclude; starting over deletes those two learning files. The README says there is no telemetry, but how your AI tool handles the code it reads depends on that service's own rules. The documentation is in English. MIT license; model and tool costs are your own.

Based on the project's public documentation. Not tested by AI Inspiration World.