CppCon 2026

First day on a new project. You set up your workstation and then download a repository of over 1,000,000 lines of code. Even more intimidating, the code has been around for 20 years. Parts are in legacy C++, parts use the latest C++26 features, and increasingly, AI coding assistants are weaving new code through all of it, meaning some parts of the codebase may have never been fully understood by a developer. You feel overwhelmed. Don't Panic! In this talk, we share techniques and tools that real engineers use to find their bearings in code they didn't write, from the humble grep through debuggers and profilers to time-travel debugging and AI-assisted exploration. The audience will leave this talk with a mix of simple and advanced tricks for navigating large and complicated codebases.