Use Cases

Overview

The idea behind C-DAD is general enough to sound abstract until you see it against a specific situation. This section covers five of them: a team inheriting a legacy system, a new engineer trying to get productive without bothering six people a day, an organization about to point AI agents at production code, a set of microservices that outgrew any one person's understanding, and a team operating under regulatory constraints that live in nobody's head but the people who were there when the rule got added.

None of these are hypothetical categories invented to sell a toolkit. They're the recurring shapes that show up whenever a system gets old enough, or big enough, or regulated enough, that the knowledge required to change it safely stops fitting inside any one person's head.

Pages in this area

• Legacy Codebase Modernization

  Making an old system safe to extend without betting a quarter on a rewrite that might not even fix the real problem.

• Onboarding New Engineers

  Replacing weeks of tribal-knowledge reconstruction with a contract a new hire can actually read.

• Preparing for AI Coding Agents

  Why legibility has to come before you point an agent at a codebase, not after something breaks.

• Microservices with Many Owners

  A capability graph as the shared map for a system no single team understands end to end.

• Regulated Industries and Compliance

  Declaring the exception paths a regulator, a customer, or an old incident actually requires.