sharkdp/hexyl · Code Currents

Code Currents/sharkdp/hexyladded

The trunk is a helix, and both of its coordinates are data. Height is time, compressed logarithmically so that a burst of commits and a three-day pause both stay visible. The angle advances one step per commit, so the pitch of the helix is the rate of work: it coils tightly through a burst and opens into a long stretch across a pause. Each bead is one commit — its height is the lines it changed, its width the files it touched. The ticks are day boundaries. Each orbit is a unit of the repository: the radius is the area it belongs to, and the rise and fall is a vertical sine whose amplitude is how much of the unit is being redone. On any one ring the radius never changes — a unit moves up and down, not outward.

Axis and marks: the time scale itself: no data, day boundaries
Bead height: lines changed in the commit
Bead width: files the commit touched
Bead grey: share of the change that was whitespace only
Orbit radius: area of the repository: core, tests, docs, tooling
Ribbon thickness: lines currently in the unit
Tail length: how long the file has existed, in commits, absolute 0–128
Orbital speed: commits touching the unit in the last 20
Wave amplitude: how much of the unit is being redone, not extended
Ripple: hunks per file in the unit's last edit
Knot size and hue: peak cyclomatic complexity, absolute scale CC 8–40
Outer ring: hour of day the commits landed in, 0h at the top

Three of these are only partially expressive: bead grey, ripple frequency and orbital speed. Orbital speed is reliable for motion against stillness, not for a value in between.

Hue is the area of the repository a unit belongs to — the same hue on the ribbon, on its knot, and on the bead of a commit whose work fell mostly in that area.

Complexity moves a ribbon off its hue

CC 820 · haloCC 40

The scale is fixed at CC 8–40 in every repository. Normalised per repository it the reading inverts: the repository with the highest peak complexity would rank last of five.

Grey is cosmetic change

all substanceall whitespace

Plain diff minus diff -w. A fully grey bead only reformatted.

Tap one to open it. One agentic trajectory and four human controls, all Rust, all pre-LLM, all over their first 172 non-merge commits. Every channel meant for comparison is on an absolute scale, which is what makes reading one against another possible at all.

Agentic

exacttexagentic

172 commits · 12 days · 119 lines/commit · 16 % later rewritten

Human controls

bathuman

172 commits · 32 days · 13.5 lines/commit · 58 % later rewritten

fdhuman

172 commits · 158 days · 14 lines/commit · 51 % later rewritten

ripgrephuman

172 commits · 209 days · 6 lines/commit · 35 % later rewritten

xsvhuman

172 commits · 116 days · 8 lines/commit · 45 % later rewritten

Added here

Measured the same way, and outside the comparison: without a producer label it cannot join the four controls the reference documents quote.

hexyladded

172 commits · 728 days · 9 lines/commit · 40 % later rewritten

stnwebadded

30 commits · 783 days · 16 lines/commit · 18 % later rewritten

Channel	exacttex	human controls
Median lines per commitbead height	119	6 – 14
Median files per commitbead width	3	1 – 1
Commits touching code and tests togetherno channel	35 %	1 % – 10 %
Units untouched in the last 20 commitsorbital speed	84 %	10 % – 77 %
Lines later rewrittenno channel	16 %	35 % – 58 %
Peak cyclomatic complexityknot hue, absolute CC 8–40	55	13 – 33
Median lines per fileno channel	332	101 – 276
Commits with a message bodyno channel	86 %	9 % – 22 %
Lines changed in whitespace onlybead grey	1 %	1 % – 7 %
Commits under 10 min after the lastaxial spacing	47 %	23 % – 50 %
Deletions against young unitswave amplitude	7 %	7 % – 30 %
Median cyclomatic complexityknot hue	2	1 – 2
On weekendsouter ring	55 %	27 % – 44 %
Hour-of-day entropyouter ring	0.87	0.75 – 0.9

A row is marked when the agentic value falls outside the range of all four controls. The unmarked rows are a result too: they rule out rhythm, cosmetic churn and young-code rework, which are the signals an unvalidated model would have claimed. Computed here from the same documents the viewer reads.