Philosophy

Review what changed, not which lines moved

A line diff tells you where text changed. A reviewer needs to know what changed: a procedure gained a required input, a component lost a prop, a migration dropped a column, a dependency jumped a major version. hiarky records what a project declares and compares those declarations, so a change reads as input: +tier instead of a wall of red and green.

Everything that shapes behaviour counts

Components are only part of a system. Routes, API procedures, database models, migrations, environment variables and dependency lists decide how it behaves just as much. hiarky treats them all as symbols, so a change to server code, a schema or package.json shows up in the same review as a change to the UI.

Rank by impact

Not every change deserves the same attention. hiarky ranks changes to the public surface (exports, signatures, routes, procedures, models, migrations) above changes to internal edges, and those above body-only edits. Every entry carries the reasons for its rank, so you can see why it scored where it did. Moves and renames are detected by body hash, so moving a directory does not look like rewriting it.

Be honest about limits

A tool is only trustworthy if it says what it does not know. hiarky's limits are explicit:

• Languages without a dedicated extractor get a shallow declaration scan with no call graph.
• A Python file that will not parse is still recorded by hash and listed under errors, so it shows as changed instead of disappearing.
• Test coverage is inferred from the dependency graph. Schema, migrations and config are exempt, and browser-driven tests register no coverage. hiarky says so instead of guessing.

Local, plain and quiet

• No server, no account, no network. Snapshots are YAML files in .hiarky/, and the viewer is a single HTML file.
• Readable and diffable. You can open a snapshot in an editor or diff it in git.
• Never floods history. Identical snapshots are skipped, so watch mode and commit hooks only record real changes.
• Never touches your working tree. Past commits are analysed in a temporary git worktree, and your own git hooks never fire.

One interface for every language

Every extractor returns the same shape: symbols, imports and re-exports. Linking, snapshotting, diffing, reviewing and the viewer all work on that shape. Adding a language means adding one file, not changing the pipeline.