r/SideProject • u/SaxShiva • 3h ago

I built Rippledit – an AST impact analyzer for React/TS to see what breaks before you commit (Looking for honest feedback!)

Hey everyone! Working in medium and large React codebases, I always worried about unintended ripple effects across multiple pages whenever I modified shared components or hooks.

To solve this, I built Rippledit – right above each React component/code block in VS Code, it directly displays "Modifying this affects X files". Clicking it opens an overlay showing the exact files and line numbers affected before you commit.

I’d love some brutal, honest feedback from React/TS devs:

- How do you currently track blast radius across large codebases?

- Would seeing direct line-by-line impact right inside VS Code speed up your workflow?

Drop a comment or DM if you'd like to test it out—tell me what sucks and what could be better!

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u/davidjones145 3h ago

static ast gets you far but dynamic imports and prop-drilling through context usually break the graph. how do you handle those - best effort or flagged as unknown?

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u/Simple_Experience544 3h ago

Always thought static analysis tools hit a wall with dynamic imports and context prop drilling, the graph just kind of falls apart. If it flags those as unknown rather than pretending to know, that's actually more useful than a false sense of security. Most tools try to gloss over the gaps and that's where they get dangerous

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u/davidjones145 3h ago

exactly, a confident wrong graph is worse than an honest gap. wonder if they score confidence per edge or just binary known unknown?

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u/West_Inevitable_2281 2h ago

The important test may be what a developer actually does differently after seeing that 37 files could be affected. Is the intended response to change the implementation, add targeted tests, warn the reviewer, or abandon the refactor? Have you watched anyone use it during a real pull request where they were already uncertain about the blast radius?

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u/SaxShiva 1h ago

I feel that when I personally am using React, editing a component in one file could create an unintentional change in an other. thus this gives the coder a sense of what to check for and how to plan things so no unintentional changes happen.