code-stats_skill

Overview

This skill analyzes a codebase for size, language composition, and semantic changes using fast line counters and AST-aware diffs. It provides quick, scriptable summaries and human-readable reports to help you understand project scale and the nature of edits. Use it to get counts, filter languages or directories, and inspect semantic differences between file versions.

How this skill works

It runs a lightweight line-count tool to enumerate files, lines, code, comments, and blanks per language and directory. For change inspection it uses an AST-aware diff tool that recognizes moved code, ignores formatting-only changes, and presents semantic edits. Both tools produce machine-friendly output for CI or JSON pipelines and readable summaries for manual review.

When to use it

• Get a fast overview of project size and language breakdown.
• Count lines of code for specific languages or the whole repo.
• Exclude generated folders like node_modules or dist before counting.
• Inspect refactorings or moves without noisy line-level diffs.
• Integrate counts or semantic diffs in CI and reporting pipelines.

Best practices

• Exclude build and dependency directories to avoid inflated counts.
• Use JSON output for automated checks and dashboards.
• Combine language filters to focus on areas of interest.
• Set the semantic diff as GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF for consistent reviews.
• Run counts periodically to track growth and detect anomalies.

Example use cases

• Run a compact tokei report to see top languages and total code lines before planning work.
• Generate JSON totals in CI and fail a job if code growth exceeds a threshold.
• Compare two TypeScript files with difft to see moved functions and renamed symbols.
• Use difft as the external git diff tool to get cleaner code review outputs.
• Exclude node_modules and dist when measuring codebase size for accurate metrics.