Back in 2015, I built my first terminal application. It scraped music catalogues, aggregated reviews, and had links for iTunes.

That little app changed how I discovered music for years. When I used it, I didn’t have to wait for a browser to load a stylesheet. It was functional and fast. It felt cool. As utilitarian as it was, it was beautiful.

The right software is a force multiplier. It can inspire new ideas, accelerate solutions, and build a better world.

AI is a seismic shift in what software is capable of, but right now, building with AI is broken.

01: Current State

The software industry is growing quickly due to AI. 36 million new users joined Github in the past year1, and 63% of people using AI to write code identify as non-developers2. Most of these developers will never write a single line of code. They’ll describe what they want, and an LLM will write it.

Currently, developers use git to create a paper trail for the code they author. Git captures the lines of code that changed and a brief sentence why, nothing else.

That paper trail is missing context. For the first time in the history of software, that context exists.

02: Context

Developers commonly have questions like, ‘why does this token expire in a day?’, or ‘what is this database column used for?’. This information has always been tribal knowledge passed organically between developers. This knowledge is rarely documented, and what is written down is inherently lossy.

Existing tools use the data that’s captured in git. The most important information, the session data, is completely missing.

This context could provide explanations for the hundreds of small decisions that are made, accelerating teams to ship more reliable code.

03: A New Foundation

When a developer starts a new coding session, they prompt the LLM with instructions for what they want to build. Dozens of decisions form the rest of the session, all of which we can excavate to build a new foundational layer.

This makes up the missing tribal knowledge that exists in conversations and meetings, and without it, it’s hard to understand the product.

But once you have it, you can answer convoluted questions. The reason your token expires in a day? It’s because it matches your session token. That confusing database column? It ended up being a temporary flag for an old A/B test.

04: Confidence

Millions of new developers don’t have the clarity to be confident in what they’re building, and the current tools require an engineer to review every line of code.

The data shows the consequences: 96% don't fully trust AI code is functionally correct, and only 48% always review before merging1. 10.3% of Lovable apps shipped with critical row-level security issues2. Even the models exhibit this gap: they identify their own vulnerabilities 78.7% of the time in review mode, but generate them 55.8% of the time by default.

We need more context to ship confidently.

05: The New Review

When this new context layer is captured, code review can change shape. Instead of reading every line of code generated by the LLM, you see the decision, the reason why, and the most important lines of code.

Instead of guessing the purpose of that confusing database column, the reviewer can see why it exists.

We’re building gx, an open source tool to collect the missing context layers from your sessions and surface it at review time, so you confidently merge new code without reading every line.

gx works with your favorite coding tool and is shipping soon.