Git history & co-changes

Static analysis tells you what the code is. Git history tells you how it behaves over time. Repowise mines your last 500 commits (configurable up to 5,000) for behavioural signals static tools can't produce.

Hotspots

Files that change often and are complex are where bugs live. Repowise computes a hotspot score from the joint distribution of churn percentile and complexity. Files in the top 25% on both axes get flagged in the dashboard, in CLAUDE.md, and surfaced by get_risk before your agent touches them.

Ownership

git blame aggregated into ownership percentages per engineer per file. Surfaces:

• Primary owner — who has historically touched this file most.
• Recent owner — the active maintainer (in case it's different).
• Contributor count — how many engineers have touched it.

Bus factor

For each file: how many people could leave the team before nobody owns it? bus_factor: 1 means a single person owns >80% of the history. Surfaced as a knowledge-risk warning in the ownership view and in CLAUDE.md.

Co-change pairs

Files that change together in the same commit without an import link between them. This is hidden coupling — the kind AST analysis cannot detect. Often the most expensive coupling because no static tool will warn you about it.

get_context surfaces co-change partners alongside direct dependencies; get_risk flags co-change warnings on PR blast-radius analysis when a changed file's historical partner is missing from the change set.

Significant commits

The last 10 meaningful commit messages per file (filtered: no merges, no dependency bumps, no lint runs) are passed to the LLM during wiki generation. The model uses them to explain why the file is shaped the way it is, not just what it does.

Trend signals

Computed from the rolling commit-rate ratio:

• Churn trend — increasing / decreasing / stable based on the 30-day vs 60-day rate (cutoffs at 1.5× and 0.5×).
• Change pattern — feature-active, fix-heavy, primarily refactored, dependency-churn, or mixed-activity, derived from commit message classification.
• Change magnitude — lines added, lines deleted, average commit size in the last 90 days.

Workspace mode

In a workspace, all of the above is computed per repo and across repos. Cross-repo co-changes (files in different repos that move together) are first-class signals and surface in get_context responses.