The hidden cost of code that nobody touches

Large, aging codebases create hidden costs because engineers must spend hours locating and understanding scattered code before safely changing it, a problem illustrated by a Sourcegraph customer with 40+ years of code across Perforce, GitHub, and GitLab in C, C++, Java, and JavaScript. AI coding assistants hit the same wall when relevant context exceeds their context windows. With cross-repository search, a JavaScript memory leak at MathWorks that historically took multiple weeks to diagnose was tracked across modules in under a week.