manifold

Architecture diagrams rot because they are drawn by hand, and graph viewers disorient because the layout moves every time you touch it. manifold does neither: it extracts the graph from source, freezes the geography once, and lets zoom change only the resolution.

Drag the z slider. Every node slides along its own ancestor chain — functions collapse into files, files into directories, directories into the repo — and slides back out. Nothing jumps, because a node's position is never recomputed. Same link, same picture, every time.

Live maps

Controls

z slider or ctrl+wheel — resolution
drag / wheel — pan and zoom
click a node — focus its subtree in place, everything else stays coarse
i — impact overlay: what breaks, what it depends on
esc — clear · filters (top left) — by edge type and confidence

What it reads

• Structure — directories, files, classes, functions; imports and calls, via tree-sitter.
• Inputs and outputs as first-class nodes — env vars, files, ports, routes, subprocesses, CLI flags, databases. The system boundary is a place on the map.
• Things related but not obviously related — shared entry points, package joins, name affinity. Always below full confidence, always drawn dashed, always filterable.

The rule it will not break

Edges only merge and split across zoom — they never appear or disappear. A bundle at coarse resolution contains exactly the edges that fan out when you zoom in. This is proved at build time in Python, re-derived independently in the browser on every change, and the packed edge arrays are hash-checked when the page loads. If any of it disagrees, the map says so in red rather than lying quietly.

Each map is one self-contained HTML file — no server, no CDN, no network at runtime. Save it, mail it, open it in five years.