Atlas extracts a hierarchic, pattern-based description of large software systems by working both top-down and bottom-up, finding common architectural and code patterns at multiple levels of abstraction. The result is a complete map of a codebase — hence the name.

Large codebases are hard to understand. Documentation drifts, architecture diagrams go stale, and tribal knowledge leaves with departing team members. Atlas aims to recover the actual architecture — not what someone wrote on a whiteboard two years ago, but what the code actually does today.

Atlas is designed as a standalone discovery tool: sometimes understanding the system is the entire goal. When paired with Uplift, the extracted patterns could become the foundation for architecture-level refactoring.