Hotspots v1.25.0: Repo Screener, CI Workflows, and Cleaner TypeScript Names

Three things in this release. Two are new capabilities; two are bug fixes. One of the bug fixes has been silently affecting every TypeScript codebase analyzed by hotspots — worth knowing about.

`hotspots train --screen`

The ML ranker (hotspots train) fits a local RandomForest on your repo’s own bug-fix history. It works well on some repos and poorly on others — the quality depends on how much fix-commit history exists and how concentrated bugs are in specific functions. Until now there was no way to check fit before spending the compute.

--screen adds a pre-flight check. Run it before training:

hotspots train . --screen
hotspots train . --blame --screen

It inspects the git history and snapshot without fitting any model, then checks:

Fix-commit count — enough labeled examples in the label window?
Positive/negative ratio — is signal too sparse to learn from?
Snapshot coverage — enough functions to generalize?

If any check fails, it prints a specific reason and exits without touching .hotspots/ranker.json. If everything looks good, it says so and exits — still without training, so you can add --eval or adjust --label-window before committing.

The practical use case: you’re evaluating hotspots on a new repo and want to know if training is worth running. --screen gives you that answer in seconds instead of after a multi-minute training run that produces a model with P@10 at baseline.

`hotspots init --ci`

Setting up a hotspots CI check used to mean writing a GitHub Actions workflow by hand. hotspots init --ci scaffolds it:

hotspots init --ci

This writes .github/workflows/hotspots.yml configured for your repo — snapshot mode on push to the default branch, diff mode on pull requests with inline annotations, and the right --format json flag for the action parser. Commit the file and push; CI picks it up automatically.

TypeScript/TSX: functions named from their assignment

This one is a correctness fix with real impact on output quality.

In TypeScript and TSX, most functions aren’t declared with function — they’re assigned:

const validate = (schema: Schema) => {
  // ...
};

export const useDataFetcher = () => {
  // ...
};

Before this fix, hotspots extracted these as anonymous functions and either omitted them from output or reported them without a name, making the hotspot list harder to act on. The fix names each function from its assigned variable — validate, useDataFetcher — so output now matches what you’d actually search for in your editor.

This affects arrow functions, function expressions, and exported constants. If you’ve noticed unnamed or missing functions in TypeScript output, this is the fix.

Python try/except/finally CFG fix

The control flow graph builder for Python produced an incorrect CFG when a try/except/finally block had all branches returning — the try body, the except handler, and the finally block each ended with a return or raise. In that case, the join node after the block has no predecessors, which caused a validation failure and incorrect cyclomatic complexity for the enclosing function.

The fix: join node creation is now lazy — it’s only created when at least one branch reaches it. Functions with exhaustive try/except/finally blocks now produce correct CC values.

Update with:

curl -fsSL https://hotspots.stephencollins.tech/install.sh | sh

or via Homebrew if you installed that way:

brew upgrade hotspots