I Detect 26 Frameworks Without AI. Here's How Deterministic File-Based Detection Works.

When I built Staxa , a platform that deploys isolated customer environments from source code, I needed to answer a deceptively hard question. "The user pushed a GitHub repo with no Dockerfile. What framework is this, and how do I containerize it?" The "easy" answer is to "call an LLM." Send the file listing, maybe the first 50 lines of the main config file, and ask it to identify the framework and generate a Dockerfile. I tried this approach early on and rejected it. Here's why, and what I built