We're excited to announce a powerful new feature in SciTools Understand: Local AI-Powered Code Descriptions. This cutting-edge enhancement brings the power of AI directly to your development environment—without any need for internet connectivity. By leveraging a locally running large language model (LLM), Understand can now generate concise, natural-language descriptions of functions, classes, and other key code structures right inside the tool. It’s an ideal solution for developers working with sensitive or proprietary codebases where security and offline accessibility are critical.

Whether you're onboarding new developers, analyzing legacy systems, or simply navigating unfamiliar code, this new feature enhances productivity and comprehension. The AI-generated descriptions integrate seamlessly with Understand’s existing analysis capabilities, allowing you to navigate and document code with even greater clarity and speed. This feature now extends beyond Understand itself as you can view the descriptions directly in our VS Code extension. Best of all, everything runs securely on your machine, with no data leaving your environment. This marks a major step toward combining the precision of static analysis with the ease of AI-driven insight.

Step through your code logically—without compiling or running it.

The new Virtual Debugger allows you to simulate execution paths, analyze decision points, and understand complex logic flows interactively. You get to decide which path to explore including stepping backwards to choose an alternative path. This is perfect for exploring unfamiliar code, finding difficult bugs, or verifying logic in safety-critical systems.

We’ve just released powerful new updates to the graphing experience in SciTools Understand to help you explore and interpret your codebase more efficiently than ever.

Interactive Node Previews with AI Summaries
Click on any node in your graph to instantly view a preview of the associated code, along with a smart AI-generated summary to help you quickly understand what that part of the code does—without digging through files.

Enhanced Graph Customization Panel
An upgraded options panel has been added to the right side of the graph. Use it to customize everything from what elements are displayed to how they’re styled—giving you more control over how your graphs look and behave.

These updates are designed to make code exploration, architecture analysis, and onboarding easier and more intuitive. Try it out today and see your code from a new perspective!