Validation and writing

Checking work against the project's own conventions, and making structural edits that land where they're supposed to rather than wherever a string happened to match.

Before creating something

Convention check — validates a proposed file path against your project's conventions before the file exists. Catches the component that was about to land in the wrong directory, at the point where moving it is free. The rules come from a file you own: see Conventions.

Finding drift

Convention audit (Max) — misplaced files, naming-convention violations, and orphan symbols: classes and functions whose names suggest a real role but whose code looks dead.

Stale symbols (Max) — symbols in files untouched for the last N commits. The "what's bit-rotting" question, useful when deciding what to review or retire.

Rename detection (Max) — probable symbol renames in recent commits, plus files that still reference the old name. Catches the half-finished rename, which is the version that compiles in one place and breaks in another.

Making changes

These matter because the alternative — find-and-replace on a string — is how an edit lands in a comment, a similarly-named function, or a test fixture nobody looked at.

Edit a symbol — replaces a named symbol by its indexed range rather than by string matching. The edit goes where the symbol is, not wherever the text matched first.

Add a symbol — inserts a new function or class into an existing file, or creates the file.

Edit lines — replaces a specific line range, for regions no symbol covers.

Rename within a file — renames a symbol and updates the matching identifiers in that same file.

Bulk rename (Max) — a string rename across files, for the cases the structural tools don't cover.

Keeping the index honest

Refresh — reindexes after an external change: an IDE edit, a git pull, a branch switch.

Refresh uncommitted work — makes dirty and untracked files findable by symbol name, so work in progress is visible to search instead of invisible until commit.

Next: Working with collaborators.