Not a Rabbit.
Don't follow trails.

The phrase started as an internal joke. We were building Octopus, an AI code reviewer, and watching how other tools worked. Most of them did the same thing: take a pull request, look at the diff, maybe peek at the few files the diff touches, and start commenting. One trail, followed in a straight line.

That is what a rabbit does. A rabbit picks a direction and runs. It is fast, it commits, and it almost always misses what is happening five steps to the left. In code review, “five steps to the left” is usually where the real bug lives. The function you renamed is called from a service you did not open. The migration you wrote breaks an assumption in a worker queue. The new auth check duplicates a guard that already exists three folders away.

We wanted a name and an animal that pushed back against this. An octopus does not chase a single trail. It wraps around an object and senses it from every angle at once. Eight arms, hundreds of suckers, distributed cognition. That is exactly what a code review tool needs to do: see the whole repository at the same time, not one diff in isolation.

So “Not a Rabbit. Don’t follow trails” became shorthand for the entire product philosophy. Octopus indexes your full codebase, builds a semantic map of every file, then reviews your pull request with that whole map in memory. It is not faster because it skips work. It is better because it does not need to guess what the surrounding code looks like.

We printed the phrase on stickers and brought them to AWS Summit. If you found one and ended up here, that is the whole story. The sticker is the bait. The thesis is on this page. The product is one click away.