Engineers are dropped onto black-box codebases with no business-logic clarity, no architecture transfer, and no ramp-up tooling

Summary

Teams routinely inherit codebases passed from team to team with zero transfer of architectural vision, no documentation, and no defined location for business logic (one lead literally said the business logic is 'all over'). New engineers and AI coding agents alike are expected to understand this black box immediately — new hires get tickets 3-4 days after joining and are judged on velocity, while AI agents re-discover the repo from scratch every task, wasting ~80% of effort on rediscovery. There is no reliable way to onboard onto a codebase's actual patterns, gotchas, and design rationale; existing documentation is stale or nonexistent, and generic courses teach someone else's code, not this repo's. This causes severe stress, missed deadlines, and slow time-to-productivity, and no product today builds a guided, repo-specific understanding path for a newcomer.