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batless Development Roadmap

Strategic development plan for batless — machine-readable code analysis for AI and automation

Vision

batless is the definitive AI-native code analysis tool. It produces structured, machine-readable output that AI assistants, CI/CD pipelines, and automation scripts can consume directly. Its unique value is not file viewing — AI assistants already have native read tools for that — but the outputs they cannot produce themselves: symbol indexes, token-estimated compressed context, semantic chunks, and content hashes.

Each release sharpens this focus: richer analysis data, broader language coverage, and a leaner binary. Interactive and cosmetic features are out of scope.

Release History

Version Released Focus
v0.3.1 Oct 2025 UX & CI/CD — AI profiles, cat compatibility, performance suite
v0.4.0 Dec 2025 AST Summarization — tree-sitter for Rust/Python/JS/TS, SummaryItem with line numbers
v0.5.0 Apr 2026 AI Efficiency — NDJSON streaming, index mode, semantic chunking, comment stripping

v0.5.0: AI Efficiency (Released April 2026)

All items shipped and tagged.

  • NDJSON streaming — removed --- separator; each chunk is compact JSON + newline
  • --with-line-numbers — JSON lines array entries become {"n": N, "text": "..."} objects
  • --mode=index — machine-readable symbol table: {kind, name, line_start, line_end, signature, visibility}
  • --chunk-strategy=semantic — streaming extends chunks to tree-sitter top-level boundaries
  • --strip-comments / --strip-blank-lines — language-aware content stripping; compression_ratio in JSON output
  • --hash — SHA-256 file hash in JSON output for change detection
  • --include-identifiers — renamed from --include-tokens (deprecated alias kept); tokens field renamed identifiers
  • estimated_llm_tokens / token_model in JSON when a profile or --ai-model is active
  • --profile=claude-max — new profile: 150K lines, JSON output, no summary
  • Claude profile raised to 20K lines (was 4K)

v0.6.0: Sharpen the Core

Target: Q3 2026

Focus: remove the fluff, fix architectural debt, and extend the AI-specific features. This release makes the strategic pivot concrete in code.

Remove: Syntax Highlighting and Themes

Syntax highlighting (--mode=highlight, syntect crate, --theme, ThemeManager) serves human terminal users — a use case where bat is the better tool. AI assistants don't benefit from ANSI color codes and have native read tools for plain file content.

  • Deprecate --mode=highlight (the default bare invocation) and --theme — emit a warning directing users to bat for human viewing
  • Remove src/highlighter.rs, ThemeManager from src/language.rs, syntect integration from src/formatter.rs
  • Remove dependencies: syntect, is-terminal, termcolor, strip-ansi-escapes
  • New default mode: --mode=plain (no colors, no syntect dependency)
  • Binary size reduction: ~1.5MB off the ~2MB binary

Remove: Interactive Wizard

src/wizard.rs (799 lines) is an interactive TUI config setup — the opposite of automation-first. Remove it; config is documented in the README.

Fix: Dead Code Cleanup

  • Delete src/debt_prevention.rs and src/performance.rs (never called)
  • Delete unused traits FileProcessing, EncodingDetection, ProcessorFactory from src/traits.rs
  • Consolidate formatter system: migrate src/formatters/ parallel dead copies into a single trait-based path in src/formatter.rs

Fix: process_stdin Parity

process_stdin is missing four features that process_file has:

  • AST summarization (currently regex-only fallback)
  • --hash support (silently ignored on stdin)
  • --strip-comments / --strip-blank-lines (silently ignored on stdin)
  • Language detection from --language flag (partially works)

Fix: extract a shared post_process(lines, language, config) pipeline that both paths call.

Feature: --mode=ast Raw Output

Expose the tree-sitter parse tree directly as JSON. Parsers are already in the dependency tree.

batless --mode=ast src/main.rs | jq '.tree.children[0]'

Feature: Multi-file Index Mode

Allow batless --mode=index src/ to process a directory and emit one JSON object per file (NDJSON), enabling a project-wide symbol table in one invocation.

batless --mode=index src/ | jq -s 'map(.symbols) | flatten | group_by(.kind)'

v0.7.0: Deeper Language Analysis

Target: Q4 2026

Build on the tree-sitter foundation to expose richer per-symbol data.

  • Signature extraction improvements — full parameter types and return types from AST nodes (not string stripping)
  • Import/dependency listing — --mode=imports emits a flat list of all imports/requires/use statements
  • Additional language coverage — Go, Ruby, C, C++ added to AST summarizer (tree-sitter grammars available)
  • --summary-level=comments — extract doc comments and attach to their symbol in index output

v1.0.0: Stability & Ecosystem

Target: H1 2027

The 1.0 milestone signals API and output schema stability. No major new features — focus on guarantees.

  • Stable JSON schema — commit to backwards compatibility for all JSON output fields; add schema version field
  • Shell completions — generated completions for bash, zsh, fish, PowerShell included in release artifacts
  • --validate flag — validate a file's JSON output against the published schema
  • GitHub Action — batless-action for using batless in CI workflows without installing manually
  • Homebrew formula — automated tap update on release
  • MSRV policy — explicit minimum supported Rust version with a documented update policy

What is NOT on the Roadmap

  • Syntax highlighting improvements — bat does this better; AI assistants don't need ANSI colors
  • Theme support — cosmetic; no AI value
  • Interactive features of any kind — anti-automation by definition
  • Plugin architecture — dynamic loading adds complexity (sandboxing, signing, registry) for unclear AI gain
  • Language Server Protocol client — LSP is a separate tool category; batless is analysis output, not an IDE backend
  • WASM / browser build — not a priority; nothing in the current user base requires it
  • Enterprise features (SSO, SAML, audit logging) — out of scope for a CLI tool

Contributing

Feature requests and design input welcome via GitHub Issues. For roadmap-level discussion, open a Discussion thread — changes to this document go through the same review process as code.