When Dennis Started Keeping Notes and Refused to Forget
A 3 AM mystery leads to a breakthrough in software architecture analysis as Dennis the tool starts recording system history.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- Dennis the code analysis tool stopped discarding valuable insights and started keeping records.
- The system maintains observation indices and evidence stores connected by deterministic hashes.
- Timestamped architectural snapshots help software projects remember their historical context.
At 3:17 in the morning, a platinum blonde wearing a black coat appeared in my office, leaving behind an unnamed folder containing a single sentence: You should ask Dennis what it saw. This marked the beginning of a peculiar investigation into a software component named Dennis.
A few days earlier, Dennis was performing a much simpler task: hunting for suspicious code duplication. The previous investigation started by asking whether parts of a codebase providing similar capabilities were genuine duplicates. The answer was annoyingly complicated, as some were legitimate interfaces while others were abstract contracts requiring closer inspection.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
Dennis eventually learned to distinguish between them, evolving from a simple duplicate finder into a tool capable of forming opinions about architecture. When Dennis evaluated a project on Monday, the specific moment and observation would vanish by Tuesday even if the code remained. The solution was simple yet profound: instead of dumping useful information into the void, Dennis started keeping two distinct records.
"Your machine saw something. Before you changed it."
The mysterious visitor
The technical implementation relied on keeping an observation index paired with an evidence store, connected through deterministic evidence hashes. Dennis did not become conscious, but it stopped throwing away useful information. By attaching timestamps to observations, the system preserved moments in time, capturing architecture snapshots before modifications were made.
While version control systems like Git excel at tracking code modifications and build systems remember inputs, software projects historically struggle to preserve what developers and systems knew at specific points in time. Enhancing analysis tools to record architectural observations bridges the gap between raw code changes and the human reasoning behind them.
Source: Dev.to
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