The developer tools market has a blind spot. There are tools for writing code (Copilot, Cursor), tools for searching code (Sourcegraph, grep), tools for testing code (Jest, Playwright), tools for deploying code (Vercel, Railway), and tools for monitoring code (Datadog, Sentry).
There is no established category for understanding code before you write it.
Look at a developer's workflow on a complex ticket:
The tools market has optimized steps 3-5. Step 1 — the largest single time block — has no dedicated tool category.
Developers cobble together understanding from: grep, IDE navigation, Slack questions, reading old PRs, and staring at unfamiliar code until it makes sense. This is the Understanding Tax, and it accounts for 20-35% of total engineering time.
Pre-code intelligence is everything that happens between "ticket assigned" and "developer starts coding":
Three market shifts created the need for this category:
The teams that solve the understanding bottleneck will ship 3-4x faster — not because they type faster, but because they start coding with full context instead of spending hours acquiring it.
Glue is the first tool built specifically for pre-code intelligence. Not code search (that's Sourcegraph). Not code generation (that's Copilot). Not code documentation (that's Swimm).
Pre-code intelligence: paste a ticket, get a battle plan. Every function traced, every dependency mapped, every lesson from git history surfaced — before you write a line of code.
Pre-code intelligence exists because of the Understanding Tax — the invisible 20-35% of engineering time lost to context acquisition that no other tool category addresses.
To quantify what this costs your team in dollars, read The Real Cost of Not Understanding Your Codebase.
Glue is the first platform built for this category. We didn't set out to create a category — we measured our own Understanding Tax, found it was obscene, and built the tool we wished existed.