Local-first tools for people who live in repos

A large share of modern developer tooling assumes the repository is happiest in someone else’s cluster. That assumption is fine for search demos. It is worse for architecture navigation, blast-radius analysis, and agent context that needs to stay close to the files you are actually editing.

What local-first buys you

• Privacy by default. Analysis does not require shipping the tree to a SaaS index.
• Latency that matches editing. Orientation should feel like part of the editor, not a round trip.
• Honesty about boundaries. Local tools are forced to work with what is on disk — which is usually the truth that matters.

Cartographer and Arcframe are built with that bias. They are not anti-cloud. They are anti-outsourcing the map of your own code.

Agents make this sharper

Coding agents amplify bad context. If the only map an agent has is a remote summary or a lucky grep, it will invent structure. Local graph and evidence layers shrink that invention surface.