GUIDES · CODE YOU CAN REMOVE

Finding Dead Code and Measuring Technical Debt

"Dead code" and "technical debt" get used loosely, but they're answerable questions: is this specific file or function referenced anywhere, and is the codebase's overall risk profile getting better or worse over time. Guessing wastes review time on both — deleting something still in use, or leaving genuinely unused code cluttering every search.

Mapnostics answers the first with evidence-backed confidence scores (100% confidence means zero references found anywhere in the codebase) and separates true dead code from zombie code — reachable but never actually executed. It answers the second with a codebase health score recalculated on every scan, so the trend is visible rather than a single point-in-time guess.

Terms in this cluster

  • Dead code vs zombie code — Dead code is code that can never run — unused exports, unreachable branches, functions nobody calls. Zombie code runs, but for no reason: it is reached only by other unused code, so the whole cluster is effectively orphaned even though each piece looks used.
  • Codebase health score — A codebase health score is a single number, usually from 0 to 100, that summarises the maintainability of a repository by combining several measured signals — such as dead code, test coverage, file size and duplication — into one figure you can track over time.

Features that answer this

  • Dead code detection — Stop shipping code nobody uses. Mapnostics finds unused exports, functions and branches across your whole codebase, with a confidence score on every finding so you know what is actually safe to delete.
  • Zombie code detection — Find zombie code that dead-code scanners miss: functions that call each other but that no route, page, job or CLI entry point ever reaches. Mapnostics walks the call graph from every real entry point and names the whole orphaned cluster.
  • Codebase health score — Track codebase health as one number from 0 to 100, deducted across six measured dimensions: dead code, zombie code, file size, test coverage, secrets exposure and duplication. Every deduction is capped and shown.

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