Umtri.io? What Does This Tool Actually Do?
As a project grows, it's easy to lose track of — or never really know — its structure. With vibe coding, even more so. Umtri is a tool that helps you understand and remember it.
As a project grows, it’s easy to lose track of its structure — or never really know it in the first place. In a vibe coding setup, it’s harder still. The Vibe Coding for Everyone series brought this problem up more than once, and in this series I want to introduce Umtri.io, a project structure tracking and visualization service built to solve exactly that.
Umtri — A Way to Track Your Project’s Growth
Umtri is a service that records and visualizes how your project’s structure has changed over time.
The core idea is simple: a project grows like a plant. It starts as a small seed, then a stem forms, branches spread out, and leaves appear. Umtri records this growth process in the shape of a tree.
| Stage | Plant Analogy | Meaning in Your Project |
|---|---|---|
| Trunk | Thick trunk | The whole app/service or a major domain |
| Limb | Main branch | A group of features or a major area of work |
| Twig | Small branch | Detailed feature groups, modules |
| Leaf | Leaf | Actual files, components, service units |
| Vein | Leaf vein | Functions, methods, and other specific behaviors |
Once you’ve recorded this structure in Umtri, if you later say something like “There’s a problem with the tag system,” you can immediately see which components are connected to it.
When Docs Alone Aren’t Enough
Documentation files like CLAUDE.md or ARCHITECTURE.md are great because you can start with no extra tools. But they share some limitations.
- As your code grows, you have to keep updating the docs by hand, and at some point they start drifting from the actual structure.
- Since they’re text, it’s hard to grasp “what the whole structure looks like right now” at a glance.
- There’s no record of the flow of time — what things looked like two weeks ago, or in what order the project grew.
Umtri targets exactly this. It visualizes your structure as a tree on a single screen, and lets you retrace the changes as a timeline. And through the MCP connection we’ll see later, you can have the AI read and update this record directly.
When Should You Start Tracking?
You don’t need to define the perfect structure right from the start. A good time to begin tracking is once your first core feature is complete. At that point, organize your current structure once, and then update the tree each time you add a new feature.
In the next post, we’ll cover how to actually connect Umtri with Claude Code — in other words, setting up MCP.