Show HN: Sonar, local cited codebase briefings tailored to your role

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GitHub - gautamdhameja/sonar: Local AI-based code explainer for fast onboarding. · GitHub

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Sonar

Understand any codebase. Ask what matters.

Sonar creates local-first, source-grounded codebase briefings for people who need project context without a subscription to a frontier coding model. It helps product managers, founders, designers, support leads, operators, executives, and technical teammates understand what a repository does, where important workflows live, and what to ask next.

Sonar is optimized for high-level orientation. For fine-grained debugging, refactoring, line-by-line code explanation, or implementation work, use an engineer or a frontier coding tool with full repository context.

What Sonar Does

Generates source-grounded briefings for an indexed repository.

Supports session-aware follow-up questions for orientation, risks, workflows, systems, and source navigation.

Builds a deterministic repository inventory, asks the model to inspect selected source files, and stores a source-backed memory graph before writing the initial briefing.

Uses exact lookup, grep-like lexical search, graph expansion, workflow planning, and briefing-specific ranking for follow-up questions and source lookup.

Returns source lists and citation verification diagnostics with generated answers.

Persists projects, source files, generated memory graphs, briefing sessions, and generated briefings in SQLite.

Runs as a Tauri desktop app backed by a local workspace engine and embedded SQLite project store.

Supports local llama.cpp/OpenAI-compatible generation or custom OpenAI-compatible cloud/local model endpoints.

Lets users copy or export generated briefings as Markdown.

Sonar is intended to produce strong source-grounded briefing drafts, especially with local models. It is not a replacement for human-reviewed technical, compliance, security, or architecture documentation.

Language Support

Sonar currently indexes TypeScript/TSX, JavaScript/JSX, Python, Rust, Go, Java, C#, Ruby, C++, PHP, Kotlin, Swift,<br>Markdown/MDX, plus selected JSON and Prisma schema files as text evidence. The repository survey also scans common<br>source extensions for high-level signals such as entry points, file IO, network boundaries, config, logging, and state.<br>Repositories that mainly use unsupported source languages can still be imported, but briefings may be less complete<br>because full parser coverage is not available for those files.

See Language Support and Limits for the current parser coverage and known limitations.

Quick Start

Sonar is currently distributed as a source-built desktop app. The expected local setup is:

Node.js 22.x, 23.x, 24.x, or 25.x. Do not use Node 26+ for source builds.

Rust toolchain and platform dependencies for Tauri

Git, if you want Sonar to clone GitHub repositories

A local OpenAI-compatible model server, or an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint you explicitly configure

Clone the repository and install dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/gautamdhameja/sonar.git<br>cd sonar<br>nvm use 24<br>npm install

If you previously installed dependencies with a different Node major version, run npm install again after switching<br>Node versions. Native dependencies such as SQLite are compiled for the active Node runtime.

Start a model server separately. For local mode, Sonar expects an OpenAI-compatible endpoint such as...

sonar source json local files repository

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