I've been working on a challenge that many developers face: how can we determine exactly what a git diff might break downstream before merging a pull request? Standard diffs only highlight local changes, without showing what depends on those modifications. To tackle this, I've created an impact analysis engine that builds a dependency graph from a TypeScript/JavaScript codebase to trace where modified functions and types are called and imported. However, I've encountered difficulties in efficiently mapping the raw Git diff information to the Babel AST parsers. Claude Opus 4.6 has helped me write the necessary "glue" to connect these two pipelines, and it worked seamlessly. Has anyone else explored AST parsing for static analysis? I'm open to discussing different approaches, and I've open-sourced my implementation if anyone is interested.
2 Answers
This is really interesting! We faced a similar situation where changing a utility function broke several other files. We resorted to TypeScript's strict mode and ESLint, but AST-level tracing sounds way more comprehensive. Have you considered using tree-sitter instead of Babel? It might be faster for bigger codebases!
It’s surprising how underutilized AST-based impact analysis is. Many teams just rely on TypeScript compiler errors to catch downstream issues, missing dynamic calls and string-based references. I worked on a project where we used ts-morph to create a reverse import map to flag potential risky changes before code review. I agree, mapping git diffs to AST can be tricky since diffs are at the line level and their nodes don’t align neatly after formatting. By the way, how do you handle renamed exports or moved files in your diffs?
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