Codebase Archaeology

Alloy should extract candidate engineering intent from existing codebases. Most codebases already encode a great deal of judgement in their structure, history, and tests; archaeology reads that judgement back out.

The output should be a set of hypotheses with confidence, observations, questions, and suggested records. Alloy reads several categories of signal to form those hypotheses, and emits them in a consistent Hypothesis Format.

Crucially, extracted intent is never asserted as fact. Each hypothesis defaults to Hypothesized until a developer validates it — see Record Lifecycle for how a hypothesis is promoted into an accepted The Engineering Intent Record.

Archaeology principles

• Label findings as hypotheses, not facts.
• Prefer questions over declarations when confidence is not high.
• Trace each hypothesis to concrete observations.
• Avoid praising the codebase for generic patterns without knowing why they exist.
• Do not infer "best practice" when the code may simply be accidental.
• Give developers quick accept/edit/reject paths.

Return to Intent Capture for the conversational counterpart, Elicitation Assistants.

Source: Product Brief §12 (Codebase Archaeology), including Archaeology principles.