By Priya Shankar, Head of Product at Glue
Every engineering organization runs on code. But the people making strategic decisions about that code -- product managers, engineering leaders, architects -- rarely have direct visibility into it. A code intelligence platform bridges that gap. It sits between raw source code and the people who need to understand what's happening inside it, turning technical complexity into clear, actionable insight.
This isn't another developer tool. It's a new category entirely.
What Is a Code Intelligence Platform?
A code intelligence platform connects to your codebase and uses AI to extract meaning from it. Not just syntax highlighting or code search, but genuine understanding: what does this service do, who owns it, how has it changed, and what are the risks?
Think of it as the difference between giving someone a dictionary and giving them a translator. A dictionary helps if you already know the language. A translator helps you understand what's being said, even if you've never studied the grammar.
Traditional code tools are built for people who write code. A code intelligence platform is built for people who need to understand code without necessarily writing it. That includes product managers, engineering managers, architects, and anyone responsible for decisions that touch the technical stack.
According to a 2024 GitHub survey, over 60% of developer time is spent understanding and maintaining existing code rather than writing new code. If even developers struggle with comprehension, imagine the challenge for everyone else on the team.
How It Differs from DevEx Platforms
Developer experience (DevEx) platforms focus on making engineers more productive. They handle CI/CD pipelines, environment management, internal tooling, and workflow automation. They're valuable, but they solve a different problem.
DevEx platforms ask: How do we help developers ship faster?
Code intelligence platforms ask: How do we help everyone understand what's being shipped?
The distinction matters because most organizations don't have a comprehension problem limited to engineers. Product managers need to know how features are structured. Engineering managers need to see where knowledge is concentrated. New hires need to get up to speed without pulling senior engineers into hours of walkthroughs.
A DevEx platform might tell you that builds are slow. A code intelligence platform tells you why a particular service keeps breaking, who last touched it, and what the downstream dependencies look like. If you've ever wondered how PMs can better understand software architecture, you're already thinking in code intelligence terms.
The overlap is small. DevEx improves the process of writing code. Code intelligence improves the understanding of what the code does and means.
Key Capabilities of a Code Intelligence Platform
Not every tool that reads code qualifies as a code intelligence platform. Here are the capabilities that define the category:
Codebase comprehension. The platform should be able to answer plain-language questions about your codebase. Not just "where is this file?" but "what does this service do?" and "how does data flow from the API to the database?"
Ownership and dependency mapping. Understanding who owns what and how components connect is foundational. When something breaks, you need to know who to talk to and what else might be affected.
Change awareness. Code changes constantly. A code intelligence platform tracks those changes and surfaces what matters: new risks, shifting ownership, growing complexity. It doesn't just show you a diff. It tells you what the diff means.
Accessibility for non-engineers. This is the defining characteristic. If only developers can use it, it's a developer tool, not a code intelligence platform. The whole point is to make codebase knowledge available to the broader team.
Historical context. Code doesn't exist in a vacuum. Understanding why something was built a certain way, when it last changed, and what decisions led to the current state is just as important as understanding the current architecture.
These capabilities work together to create something that didn't exist before: a shared understanding of the codebase that spans roles and technical skill levels. You can learn more about the formal definition in our code intelligence glossary.
Who Benefits Most from Code Intelligence?
The short answer: anyone who makes decisions that affect or are affected by the codebase.
Product managers are often the biggest beneficiaries. They're responsible for prioritization, scope, and trade-offs, but they're usually making those calls with incomplete technical context. A code intelligence platform gives PMs the ability to understand complexity, dependencies, and risk without scheduling a meeting with an engineer every time they have a question.
Engineering managers gain visibility into knowledge distribution, code health, and team workload patterns. Instead of relying on gut feel or one-on-ones to figure out where bottlenecks exist, they can see it directly.
New engineers onboarding onto a team benefit enormously. Instead of spending weeks reading documentation that's probably outdated, they can ask the platform questions about the codebase and get accurate, current answers.
Architects and tech leads use code intelligence to audit dependencies, identify areas of growing complexity, and make informed decisions about refactoring priorities.
CTOs and VPs of Engineering get a strategic view. They can see patterns across teams, identify systemic risks, and make resource allocation decisions grounded in data rather than anecdotes.
The common thread is that all of these roles need to understand the codebase, but none of them should have to read every line of code to do it.
A Practical Example
Imagine your team is planning the next quarter. The PM wants to add a new payments integration. Engineering thinks it's a two-sprint project. But nobody has looked at the payments service in six months.
With a code intelligence platform, you'd ask: "What's the current state of the payments service?" You'd see that it has three dependencies that haven't been updated, one engineer who wrote 90% of it left the company two months ago, and there's a known complexity hotspot in the transaction validation logic.
That changes the conversation. Instead of discovering these problems mid-sprint, you plan for them. That's the difference between reacting and strategizing.
Where Glue Fits
Glue is a code intelligence platform built for this exact purpose. It connects to your repositories, uses AI to understand your codebase, and makes that understanding available to your entire team through natural-language questions, visual maps, and automated insights.
Glue doesn't replace your IDE, your CI/CD pipeline, or your project management tool. It fills the space between them, the space where understanding lives. Whether you're a PM trying to scope a feature, an EM trying to plan onboarding, or a tech lead evaluating technical debt, Glue gives you the context you need without requiring you to read the code yourself.
If your team has ever lost time to miscommunication between product and engineering, Glue is worth a look.
FAQ
What is a code intelligence platform?
A code intelligence platform is a tool that connects to your source code and uses AI to make the codebase understandable to everyone on the team, not just developers. It provides capabilities like natural-language Q&A, dependency mapping, ownership tracking, and change awareness. The goal is to turn raw code into strategic insight that product managers, engineering leaders, and other stakeholders can act on.
How does code intelligence differ from developer experience?
Developer experience (DevEx) platforms focus on making engineers more productive by improving workflows, CI/CD, and tooling. Code intelligence focuses on making the codebase understandable to a broader audience, including non-technical roles. DevEx improves how code gets written. Code intelligence improves how code gets understood and discussed across the organization.
Who uses code intelligence platforms?
The primary users are product managers, engineering managers, architects, new engineers onboarding to a team, and technical leaders. Anyone who needs to understand the codebase to make better decisions can benefit. The key differentiator from traditional developer tools is that code intelligence platforms are designed to be accessible to people who don't write code daily.