Day One of Building Graphalt - Peeking Inside the Machine
Hey everyone 👋
Today marks Day One of building Graphalt a project I’ve been dreaming about for a while: a tool that turns codebases into living documentation that actually understands your code.
But before I can build that, I need to understand something much deeper how code itself works under the hood.
So today I spent the entire day diving into ASTs (Abstract Syntax Trees) and Babel, trying to understand how code becomes code.
At first, it seemed simple:
You give Babel some JavaScript → it parses it → transforms it → spits it back out.
But once you look inside, it’s chaos. Organised chaos.
Each function, variable, and operator becomes a node in a giant tree. And that tree is where the real logic lives.
By the end of the day, I realised two things:
I understood maybe 10% of what I read.
That 10% opened my eyes to how structured and fascinating code really is when seen from the compiler’s perspective.
For Graphalt, this foundation matters.
If I want to make codebases self-documenting and explorable, I first need to understand how to read them the way a compiler does before adding any AI layer on top.
Right now, it feels like I’m standing at the bottom of a mountain looking up. But it’s the kind of mountain worth climbing.
If you’ve ever worked with ASTs, compilers, or Babel I’d love to hear your thoughts or advice before I go deeper.
📖 Full entry here: https://www.graphalt.com/journal/2025-10-22-day-one
Replies