Use case
How do you bring a legacy codebase under agent management?
On first connect, CatWrangler reads your existing code and docs and extracts decisions, so agents don’t start from a blank slate. After that, an agent describes its intent and gets a pre-digested briefing instead of crawling the repo to get oriented.
A legacy codebase is mostly undocumented intent. The code is there; the reasons it looks the way it does are not. That gap is exactly what slows an agent down — and exactly what CatWrangler closes on day one.
Day one: it reads what you already have
You don’t start from a blank slate. When you connect an existing repo, CatWrangler reads the code and the docs and extracts decisions from them — so the reasoning that used to live only in someone’s head, or in a commit message nobody reads, becomes something an agent can look up.
That means the 'why' that used to live only in someone's head, or in a commit message nobody reads, becomes something an agent can look up. It works on large and old codebases, which is precisely where that knowledge is scarcest and most expensive to reconstruct.
After that: briefings, not archaeology
Once your code is in, agents stop crawling. An agent describes its intent in plain language and gets back a briefing: what the project is, how it's structured, the decisions that apply to the work at hand, and where to make the change.
- No grepping a strange repo for an hour to find the three files that matter.
- Relevant decisions arrive with the briefing, so an agent builds in line with how the codebase already works.
- Before building, the system surfaces code and decisions that already do the job — so an agent extends what exists instead of duplicating it.
- Bring a repo in, or take it back out, in one shot. No lock-in.
“Onboarding a brand-new project was smooth: one call delivered the whole protocol, the runtime contract, and the deploy surface, and the gate sequence never got in the way. I never hand-wrote a migration.”
Related questions
Do I have to document the codebase first before agents can use it?
No. CatWrangler reads your existing code and docs on first connect and extracts the decisions itself. Agents get pre-digested briefings from that — you don't write documentation to get started.
Does this work on a large or old codebase?
Yes — that's the point. Big, legacy codebases hold the most undocumented intent, so onboarding pays off most there. Agents describe what they want to do and get a briefing instead of crawling the whole repo.
Keep reading
Vibe-Engineering
Many agents. One codebase. Zero collisions.
Point your agents at CatWrangler and build — the discipline runs underneath.