---
title: magus insight
description: "Show where a codebase's attention and risk concentrate: hotspots, temporal coupling, ownership, and trend from VCS history, plus volatility from run-outcome history."
tags: [cli, magus insight, analysis, hotspots, ownership, coupling, vcs, volatility, flaky]
---

# magus-insight

Behavioral code analysis from VCS and run-outcome history

## Synopsis

**magus** insight \<lens\> [flags]

## Description

Read history to show where a codebase's attention and risk concentrate.
Four lenses read version-control history; a fifth, volatility, reads run-outcome
history instead. The VCS lenses are contextual to the working directory by default -
run from inside a subtree and each reflects only that subtree's history; pass
--workspace to analyze the whole workspace (the fan-in postflight uses this). The
active VCS adapter must report per-commit files (git can).

VCS-history lenses (the first argument):

hotspots   Edit frequency x complexity - the prime refactoring targets. The
             project view is the dependency graph heat-colored by churn (with
             authors, recency, blast radius, and CI duration); --files ranks
             individual files by churn x complexity.
  affinity   Projects that change together (temporal coupling). A hidden pair
             co-changes without either declaring a dependency on the other - a
             candidate architectural smell.
  ownership  Author concentration: the primary author and their share, distinct
             author count (bus factor), and abandonment (projects gone quiet).
  trend      The recent half of the window versus the earlier half: a positive
             delta is a rising hotspot, a negative one is cooling.

Run-outcome lens:

volatility Each (project, target) pair's recent pass/fail/volatile record scored
             by its Wilson lower bound; a pair at or above the configured threshold
             is flagged volatile - a flakiness signal, the prime stabilization
             targets. It reads the shared runtime-history file, not git, so it takes
             no --commits/--since window and is always workspace-wide.

report     Every lens plus graph stats as one whole-workspace Markdown document.
             With --mermaid-style=safe the Mermaid subset is restricted to what
             older or partial renderers (GitHub step summaries, blog renderers)
             reliably handle; the default "standard" emits the full Mermaid spec
             for tools that render it. The magusfile's postflight target prints
             this to stdout for local use.

The VCS lenses read the commit log: --commits caps the scan; --since bounds it by
date (90d, 12w, 6mo, 1y). Each lens accepts -o text|json|yaml|name; hotspots and
affinity also render -o mermaid (the hotspots file view renders a
churn-vs-complexity quadrant). The structural companion - god nodes, orphans, and
doc coverage from the knowledge graph - is magus graph stats; the report embeds it.

## Options

**--commits** *int* (default: 500)
: Cap on how many recent commits to scan (VCS lenses only)

**--files**
: hotspots: rank individual files instead of projects

**--since** *string*
: Only commits within this window, e.g. 90d, 12w, 6mo, 1y (VCS lenses only)

**--workspace**
: Analyze the whole workspace instead of the current project/subtree

## Examples

*Prime refactoring targets (files)*

```sh
magus insight hotspots --files
```

*Churn-vs-complexity quadrant*

```sh
magus insight hotspots --files -o mermaid
```

*Hidden architectural coupling*

```sh
magus insight affinity
```

*Bus factor and abandonment*

```sh
magus insight ownership
```

*Rising vs cooling activity*

```sh
magus insight trend --since 90d
```

*Flaky (volatile) targets*

```sh
magus insight volatility
```

*Whole-workspace report (all lenses)*

```sh
magus insight report --workspace
```

## See Also

[**magus**(1)](magus.md), [**magus-ls**(1)](magus-ls.md), [**magus-describe**(1)](magus-describe.md), [**magus-run**(1)](magus-run.md), [**magus-x**(1)](magus-x.md), [**magus-where**(1)](magus-where.md), [**magus-affected**(1)](magus-affected.md), [**magus-graph**(1)](magus-graph.md), [**magus-watch**(1)](magus-watch.md), [**magus-status**(1)](magus-status.md), [**magus-doctor**(1)](magus-doctor.md), [**magus-config**(1)](magus-config.md), [**magus-server**(1)](magus-server.md), [**magus-completion**(1)](magus-completion.md), [**magus-man**(1)](magus-man.md), [**magus-init**(1)](magus-init.md), [**magus-self**(1)](magus-self.md), [**magus-version**(1)](magus-version.md)