From Unknown to Understood: Navigating Codebases with GitHub Copilot

As an engineer, the nature of the job means that we are moving teams, switching to new products or changing jobs with some frequency. Even if we have been working on the same feature for years, it's impossible for one person to keep track of everything in a particular codebase. Understanding how everything fits together can be slow, error-prone, and frustrating — especially under time pressure. Rather than treating AI as a code generator, I reframed it as an investigative partner — one that can trace execution paths, correlate logic across file structures, and surface insights that would otherwise take hours or days to uncover. As AI coding tools evolve, it is important as engineers that we are able to keep up with the latest trends while also maintaining our productivity. I have found it quite challenging to reframe my thinking that while it may take me all of today to get a better understanding of this particular tool, tomorrow I will be more productive for it. And most of the time i