Corbell: Open Source CLI for Cross-Repo Architecture Analysis and Design Docs

Corbell is an open source CLI tool that analyzes codebases to build cross-service architecture graphs and generate design documentation. It's positioned as a free alternative to Augment Code MCP, which costs $20/month.

Key Features

• Scans your repositories and builds a cross-service architecture graph
• Generates and reviews design documents grounded in your actual codebase
• Provides a dark theme clean UI to explore your repositories
• No SaaS, no cloud dependency, no account required
• Everything runs locally on SQLite and local embeddings via sentence-transformers
• Your code never leaves your machine

LLM Integration

The LLM parts (spec generation, spec review) are fully BYOK (Bring Your Own Key). Works with:

• Anthropic
• OpenAI
• Ollama (fully local option)
• Bedrock
• Azure
• GCP

You can run the entire graph build and analysis pipeline without touching an LLM at all if you want.

Problem It Solves

Teams with 5-10 backend repos lose cross-service context constantly, during code reviews and when writing design docs. Corbell builds the graph across all your repos at once and lets you:

• Query it
• Generate specs from it
• Validate specs against it

Additional Features

• Ships an MCP server so you can hook it directly into Cursor or Claude Desktop and ask questions about your architecture interactively
• Apache 2.0 licensed
• No open core, no paid tier hidden behind the good features
• Python 3.11+