What Cartographer is
Cartographer is an open source command line tool, released under the MIT licence, that reads the session history your coding agent already keeps and tells it back to you as a story: what you asked for, what the agent did, what that meant technically, and how you responded. It files each map under the git repository it belongs to, replays the whole build when a project is done, and judges the build against the goal you declared before you started.
It works with Claude Code today. Codex and Cursor support is coming once we have checked it against real session history. Cartographer is plain Python with no dependencies, it runs on your machine only, and the only network call it ever makes is the installer downloading the tool. Nothing about your sessions leaves your computer. That is a design decision, not a current limitation, and it is explained in detail on the Privacy page.
Why it exists
Git records what changed. It does not record how you got there: the prompt that sent the agent in circles for forty minutes, the correction that finally landed, the moment you stopped reading and started trusting. A few weeks into a build those moments are gone, and all that is left is the diff.
The transcript has all of it. Every prompt, every reply, every tool call and error is sitting in a file on your disk. It is just unreadable at the length it comes in. Cartographer's job is to make that record legible without flattering anyone: every claim in a map has to cite the moment in the transcript it came from, "what it meant" has to name a technical consequence rather than an adjective, and the tool rejects praise words on save. The verdict on a version waits until the version is done, because a session cannot judge itself.
The method behind that comes from a particular way of studying work. The person behind Situated Strategies is a software implementation specialist by day and a doctoral researcher in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, the study of how people actually get things done together, turn by turn, in the record of what they said and did. Cartographer applies that habit of reading to the turns between a person and an agent. The questions it asks of a transcript are the same ones that discipline asks of any recorded interaction: what did this turn do, what did the next turn make of it, and where did the work go off course and get repaired?
Who makes it
Cartographer is made by Situated Strategies LLC, a small company in the United States. The company builds practical tools and products around one idea: that the best guide to how something should work is a close look at how people actually use it. Cartographer is its first developer tool.
The source is public at github.com/situatedstrategies/cartographer. Issues, pull requests and forks are welcome. The tool is free, and it will stay free; if it has been useful to you, there is a Ko-fi page for people who want to support the work.
What we will not do
We will not send your session history anywhere. We will not add telemetry to the tool. We will not describe what any coding agent does internally beyond what its vendor documents, and when we cite research or documentation on this site, the citation links to the source and says no more than the source does. When team sharing arrives it will be something you turn on, not a default.
Reaching us
Something broke, or a question about the tool: support@codecartographer.dev, ideally with the output of cartographer doctor. A map you would like to show us, or thoughts on the maps you got: mapit@codecartographer.dev. Both addresses are read by a person.