ripwire — the ripgrep of AI context

[![CI](https://github.com/redhat-et/ripwire/actions/workflows/ci.yml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/redhat-et/ripwire/actions/workflows/ci.yml) [![Release](https://img.shields.io/github/v/release/redhat-et/ripwire)](https://github.com/redhat-et/ripwire/releases/latest) [![Licence](https://img.shields.io/badge/licence-Apache%202.0-blue.svg)](LICENSE) [![Standard](https://img.shields.io/badge/C%2B%2B-23-blue.svg)](CONTRIBUTING.md) [![Runtime dependencies](https://img.shields.io/badge/runtime%20dependencies-none-blue.svg)](THIRD_PARTY.md) [![Slides](https://img.shields.io/badge/slides-the%20showcase%20deck-56d6e8.svg)](present/ripwire-showcase.pdf) # Rip'n Fast. Less Tokens. Better Code. ## Give your coding agent a map before it reads the repo. **ripwire is the ripgrep of AI context.** Point it at any repository and your agent gets a ranked, deterministic call graph — what to touch, what it breaks, which tests to run — instead of grepping around and reading whole files. ***Paddle out with a map.***
Fifty years of software-engineering results, and research from last month. 42 repositories and 67 papers folded — McCabe (1976) through to seven papers published in the last two months — each row in docs/LINEAGE.md naming the lesson taken and the file it lives in, all of it put into a single blazing-fast compiled executable Beside those sits a labelled survey of **237 tools** that contributed nothing and says so. The two sets are disjoint by construction, so they add rather than nest — a tool that gave a lesson is never counted twice. **Both halves are load-bearing, and they are doing different jobs.** The settled results are what make the quality lens trustworthy: McCabe on complexity (1976), Halstead on volume (1977), Spärck Jones on term specificity (1972), Nagappan & Ball on churn. Fifty years of replication means those are not opinions, and a tool that measures your code should be built on the ones that survived. The recent work is what makes it *current*: **seventeen of the folded papers are from 2026, seven published in the last two months and three in the last thirty days** (dates as of 2026-09-08; every row carries its arXiv id, so the claim is checkable rather than atmospheric). Retrieval for coding agents, context-compression cost, placebo-controlled localization — that literature is months old, not decades, and several rows were folded within weeks of the paper appearing. Neither half alone would be enough. A tool built only on the classics would not know what an agent needs; one built only on last month's preprints would have nothing underneath it. And the newest row is a result that **failed** when it was tested here — which is the point of writing them down. All three counts are re-derived from that document's own tables by `test/readmedriftcheck.sh` on every run, which fails if this page and those tables disagree, so the claim cannot quietly drift. The row-by-row ledger is [`docs/LINEAGE.md`](docs/LINEAGE.md).
**Languages:** Rust · C++ · Objective-C/C++ · C · Metal · CUDA · Python · Go · Swift · TypeScript · JavaScript · Java · Ruby · PHP · Lua · Elixir · Bash · C# · JSON · TOML · YAML · Markdown — see [language support and limits](#languages). ### No API key. No embeddings. No index server. No daemon.
One process, no server — indexes this repository in 0.25 s using 6.6 MB, against 46.8 s and 391 MB for the graph-database MCP server it was measured against; warm queries answer in 197 ms to its 1,082 ms Measured on 48 matched questions across django, webpack and this repository. Across all three, ripwire indexes in **0.25–0.45 s** and **6.6–16.5 MB** against that server's **23–52 s** and **391–623 MB**. The full method, the wins named one by one and the losses included, is in [Against the leading graph-database code-context MCP server](#against-the-leading-graph-database-code-context-mcp-server) and [`docs/EVALS.md`](docs/EVALS.md).
One binary, offline — and the same line activates the skills for every agent it finds: Claude Code · Codex · Cursor · Windsurf · Gemini · opencode · aider One self-contained binary on your own machine, offline, installed in one line — and the same line installs *and activates* the task-shaped skills that teach your agent *when* to reach for it, not just how, for every agent it finds on the machine. If your agent can run shell commands — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Gemini, opencode, aider — it is set up the moment the install finishes; [the MCP server is the optional second interface](#set-it-up-in-your-coding-agent). Install it and ask it something before you finish reading this page:
```bash RIPWIRE_REPO=redhat-et/ripwire bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/redhat-et/ripwire/main/scripts/install.sh)" export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH" # where it installed; the installer prints this line if you need it cd your-repo ripwire . --for="" ``` **Reach for the CLI first — it is the cheaper interface.** The MCP server is the optional second way in, and its convenience has a cost the shell pipe does not carry: its verb schemas sit in your agent's context every session, whether or not it calls them. ### Same answer, a fraction of the tokens — read this table first if your agent is on a budget
How these ten rows were measured — 2026-08-08, figures in ~tokens (≈ bytes/4), every ratio from a real run reproduced by the command in its row Ten everyday moments, re-measured on this repository, 2026-08-08. Figures are ~tokens (≈ bytes/4); every ratio comes from a real run, reproduced by the command in its row — raw byte counts and exact commands in [`docs/EVALS.md` §5](docs/EVALS.md#readme-grade-rows-re-measured-on-this-repository-2026-08-08).
Ordered understand → navigate → review-the-change: | Ask it | Command | ripwire | naive read | token savings | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | "Orient me in this repo" | `ripwire .` | **~5.6K tok** | ~20K–25K tok — read `README.md` (+`docs/ARCHITECTURE.md`) | 3.6×–4.5× | | "Where is X handled?" | `ripwire . --for="…"` | **~2.1K tok** | ~4.9K–20K tok — `grep -rn src/`, then read the file it points at | 2.3×–9.3× | | "What do I already know?" | `ripwire . --recall="…"` | **~15K tok** | ~445K tok — read all 119 markdown docs this repo carries | 29.2× | | "Set me up for this task" | `ripwire . --pack-task="…"` | **~2.1K tok** | ~16K–80K tok — read every relevant file, whole | 7.7×–37.7× | | "Show me this one function" | `ripwire . --expand=SYM --top-k=0` | **~260–16.5K tok** body (+~5.7K for the ranked-neighborhood bundle) | ~43K–174K tok — read the whole file it lives in | 2.6×–670× | | "Who calls this function?" | `ripwire . --callers=SYM` | **~580 tok** | ~40K–52K tok — `grep -rn SYM src/` (mostly noise), then open 2–3 files to sort real calls from mentions | 69.2×–89.1× | | "Is it safe to change this?" | `ripwire . --impact=SYM` + `--uses=SYM` | **~1.3K tok** | ~18K tok — open every direct-use file, whole | 14.4× | | "I have a stack trace" | `ripwire . --from-trace=FILE` | **~1.4K tok** | ~124K–298K tok — grep all 7 frame names, then open the innermost file(s) | 86.9×–208.6× | | "I changed these files — tests? blast radius?" | `ripwire . --situ` | **~410 tok** | ~3K–132K tok — `git diff` + `grep -rn test/`, then open the candidates | 7.3×–324.2× | | "Review this PR/diff" | `ripwire . --pr-context=REF` | **~1.9K tok** | ~4.8K–51K tok — `git diff REF`, then open the touched files | 2.6×–27.5× |
Same-correct-answer verification, and the honesty line these ratios come with **These aren't summaries that gamble with information.** Each row is scored same-correct-answer-or-it-doesn't-count, and both sides were checked, not assumed: orient surfaces this repo's own pipeline files (`ingest.cpp`, `graph.h`, `serialize.h`) in the first screen, the same three `docs/ARCHITECTURE.md` names as central; the `--for` row lands `mcpStale` (`src/mcpindex.h:633`), the actual staleness check, 5th-ranked; `--recall` lands the container-rule doc (`AGENTS.md`) that states, verbatim, the same "no `std::map`" rule `CONTRIBUTING.md` explains in full; `--pack-task` names the same three touch points a human would — `cachelint.h`, `mergeCachePack` (`src/main.cpp:1787`), the `lintrules.h` helpers it reuses; `--expand --top-k=0` hands back the requested function's complete, unmodified body — the ranked-neighborhood addition costs the same ~22.6 KB regardless of which function you ask for, confirmed on two (a fixed floor, not per-function variance); `--callers` on `langOfPath` names its 2 real callers, the same ones a `grep` hit-list buries under 5 files of comment-only mentions; `--impact`+`--uses` on `coversOrEquals` names the same 2 direct call sites `--uses` alone would, plus (disclosed) a transitive reach `--uses` doesn't cover at all; `--from-trace` resolves all 7 frames of a real call chain by name to the same definitions a per-frame grep would eventually find, mixed with call sites and comments; `--situ` on a 2-file diff names the same 6 real test harnesses, 2 of which a filename grep across `test/` cannot find even after opening every one of its 41 candidates — a completeness gap, not just a byte one; `--pr-context` surfaces co-change partners (`test/regression.sh`, `src/main.cpp`) a raw `git diff` has no way to know were usually touched and weren't this time. The map ranks and discloses — it never paraphrases your code — and every truncation is disclosed in the header. **The honesty line, made concrete:** the same auto-selection behind the `--expand` row also runs the other way. On a small file (`pageRankDouble` in `src/pagerank.cpp`, 5,559 B) the ranked bundle would cost 27,916 B — nearly 5× more than the file — so ripwire serves the file itself instead, disclosed as `mode="whole-file"` on the response, not silently. [`docs/EVALS.md` §7](docs/EVALS.md#7-honest-counterexamples) lists that and the other counterexamples this project publishes against itself.
Where those savings compound: an orchestrator that matches tasks to models — every lane it spawns starts cold on the same tree. The map is the one artifact that does not have to be rediscovered per agent, and the quality verbs hand a verdict back instead of a pile of files to re-read The shape: plan the work, then run a loop that matches each task to the model that fits it. Every thread it spawns opens with an empty context on a repository it has never seen. **Orienting an empty context to a large repository is the most repeated cost in the whole system, and the one this tool was built for** — it is also the cost that grows with the size of the tree, which is why the pattern matters more the bigger the repository gets. `--for` and `--pack-task` answer it in a single call, at the per-call rates in the table above, instead of a grep-and-read tour that every lane pays over again from scratch. The return path matters as much. `--quality-delta`, `--test-gate` and `--edit-check` answer *what did I make worse*, *which tests must run*, *did I change a contract* — quantitative answers a lane can hand back as a verdict, rather than a transcript the orchestrator has to read to find out what happened. **What is and is not claimed here.** Every figure on this page is a single-agent measurement. That the saving compounds with the number of cold orientations follows from the fixed-cost mechanism, but it is pre-registered and **unrun** — the reason the pattern is worth trying, not a result this project has published.
### See the map — not just the numbers

ripwire --html on Django's migration autodetector: 120 symbols, 183 call edges, arrows pointing caller to callee, nodes coloured by cyclomatic complexity on a five-stop scale running deep blue, mid blue, amber, orange, pale yellow, module outlines drawn as translucent regions, and low-confidence call edges drawn with dashed shafts

Django's migration autodetector, coloured by complexity. Thresholds are fixed, so the colour means the same thing on every repo you point it at.

```bash ripwire path/to/django/db/migrations --rank-by=rrf --top-k=120 --color-by=cx --html=map.html ```
The same graph twice: above coloured by cyclomatic complexity, below by git commit count. Most nodes sit in a different colour band between the two. A close crop showing solid and dashed call edges side by side; dashed shafts mark calls the resolver could not pin to a single target
The same graph, re-coloured by git churn. 76% of these nodes move to a different band — structure and history disagree, and one run shows you both. A dashed shaft is a guess. 31 of 183 edges here are one arm of a split the resolver could not choose between. No other tool marks which of its arrows it is unsure about.
How to read these pictures — the five lenses, the fixed thresholds, and what the renderer refuses to draw One self-contained HTML file (`--html[=FILE]`), no server, no CDN, no external asset. `--color-by=lang|community|cx|churn|tested` sets the initial colour; the page embeds all five and keeps a live selector, so switching lens costs no second run. Read from the figures above, which state their own rules in a sidecar saved beside each image: - **arrow points caller → callee** — the graph is directed, and the page draws it that way. - **`31 of 183 shafts dashed in this view = the resolver could not choose between same-name definitions and split the call over all of them`** — per *edge*, not per symbol. A symbol-level "this function makes some ambiguous calls" would mark every one of its edges, which would be a lie about most of them. - **labels: top 24 by in-view degree, one per name** — one label per distinct name, so a picture of a container class stops crowding out the functions you asked about. - **shapes: ● fn ■ cls ✚ var** — kind is nominal data on a nominal channel; complexity never uses shape. - **module outlines: `7 of 12 modules with 3+ nodes in view (cap 12; 3 dropped as too thin to read as a region; 2 dropped as enclosing mostly other modules)`** — three separate truncations, each with its own count and its own reason. The `cx` and `churn` ramps share one five-stop scale, ordered so lightness rises with the value — it survives greyscale printing, and every adjacent pair stays separable under protanopia, deuteranopia and tritanopia. Thresholds are fixed rather than per-corpus quantiles, so a hot node cannot be manufactured by a cold repository. `churn` needs real git history: a shallow clone reports every file as one commit, and a directory with no repository says `churn unavailable` rather than drawing zeros.
One deterministic, token-budgeted answer: the relevant symbols, their callers, the change risks, and the tests that reach them. The task is yours to phrase — ask about *your* code, not ours. Run on this repository (2026-08-30), `ripwire . --for="incremental cache invalidation"` answers in about 4.3K tokens with: *This is what the output looks like, not the token-savings recipe.* A bare `--for` on every question is the most expensive way to use this tool — see [Where it pays most](#where-it-pays-most-and-where-it-does-not) and the three controls below it.
What those 4.3K tokens actually contain — ranked symbols with their doc comments quoted in place, risk annotated on every row, one-hop callers, and the answer's own confidence= - **The ranked symbols, in rank order** — the cache-header constant `kCacheMagic` first (with its doc comment quoted in place and the one `next=` call that opens it), then `spanTierMemoPath` (the cache-path composer), `ingestCommitTree`, … `ingest` — each row with its file, line, and signature. - **Risk, annotated in place** — complexity, git churn (`ingest` shows 128 recent edits), change amplification (touch `ingest` and 266 graph nodes feel it), purity and test coverage. The fragile spots are visible *before* anything touches them. - **One-hop call context** — `spanTierMemoPath` calls `shaKeyedCachePath`, `headSnapRepoHex`, `exclConfigHex`; no second query needed to see the neighbourhood. - **Its own confidence** — this answer says `confidence="high"` with the score margin attached; a flat ranking says `low`, so it reads as a starting point instead of masquerading as an answer. `confidence=` measures how clearly the ranking separates its head from the rest, not whether the head is what you meant: ask a repository about a concept it does not contain and the best lexical matches still rank, confidently. Phrase the task in your code's own words.
The actual wire format — what your agent reads (minified XML; trimmed and line-wrapped here) ```xml incremental cache (--cache): per-file content hash + raw facts so a re-run re-parses ONLY …constexpr std::uint32_t kCacheMagic = … … … … … … … … ``` `cx=` complexity, `churn=` git edit frequency, `amp=` change amplification, `r=` rank; `` rows carry the one-hop call context, caps disclosed. Every attribute is defined in the one legend at the top of the real output, which also self-reports the bundle's cost — `est_tokens="3995"` here.
| The agent without a map | The agent with ripwire | | --- | --- | | greps a common word, gets hundreds of hits across dozens of files | one ranked answer — `est_tokens="3995"` on this repository (re-derived 2026-09-05, the run above) | | reads whole files to find the symbols that matter | those symbols, with complexity, churn and test coverage inline | | finds the callers only if it thinks to grep for them too | callers, blast radius and the tests to run, in the same bundle | | pays for every line it read, right or wrong | **5.0%** of what that grep-and-read pass spends — on a 12-question set where it strictly satisfied **5** to the naive arm's **11** (re-derived 2026-08-23) | **Both halves of that sentence, because one without the other is an overclaim.** The 5.0% is context compression, not equal task completion: on the five questions *both* arms strictly satisfied, ripwire spends **5.2%** of what the naive pass spends. Cheap context that answers less is not a saving if the agent then retries. The full adjudication, the four ranking defects behind the eleven-to-five gap, and the run where this number got **worse** are in [Measured](#measured).
58.3% of instances with all gold files in the top 10 — the best alternative lands 40.0%, while indexing in 0.31 s And against five retrieval competitors on a held-out LocBench slice, it finds **all** gold files in the top 10 on **58.3%** of instances — the best alternative lands 40.0% — while indexing in 0.31 s. [The full leaderboard, losses included ↓](#graph-ranked-retrieval-it-finds-the-right-files-more-often-than-the-alternatives)
### Against the leading graph-database code-context MCP server **Won 27 · lost 7 · tied 14** on 48 matched questions across django, webpack and this repository, spending **~77K tokens against its ~486K** for the whole sweep.
The full result, how it was measured, and where ripwire still loses The 48 questions span symbol lookup, conceptual search, blast radius, and one-call task orientation. ripwire indexes the same three repositories in 0.25–0.45 s and 6.6–16.5 MB, against that server's 23–52 s and 391–623 MB, and answers a warm query in a median 197 ms against its 1,082 ms. Its seven wins are real and named one by one in the method. Both arms warm with a pre-built index, median of 3 timed calls, stdout to a file rather than a pipe. The competitor ran in its stronger retrieval configuration; its numbers were recorded once and then frozen, and ripwire's side was re-run after the fixes the first pass produced. Per class, as a share of the competitor's bytes on totals: symbol lookup **1.35×**, conceptual search **1.23×**, blast radius **0.39×**, task orientation **0.06×**. Where it loses: on a plain one-symbol lookup the competitor answers in about a kilobyte carrying callers and callees, and ripwire spends roughly three times that to also hand back the body. It ranks a chunk-id plugin first on one webpack query where ripwire never surfaces the directory at all — a ranking miss, and a fix for it was built, met its pre-registered band, and was reverted anyway for failing a separate standing requirement. Its depth-labelled blast radius and its import edges are both better presentations than ripwire's flat reaching-set. Full method, pins, per-class tables, the carried-versus-re-judged ledger, and the complete list of what the competitor does better: [`docs/EVALS.md` §2](docs/EVALS.md#2-head-to-head-against-other-tools).
Nothing it is unsure about reaches your agent unlabelled — unindexed languages named in the map's first line, a parse-health row on any file it cannot vouch for, every skipped file itemized with its reason **Nothing it is unsure about reaches your agent unlabelled — and nothing it could not see goes unnamed.** Every guess is marked in the output, and every mark has a next step — up to handing it a compiler-grade index. Point it at a repository whose main language it has no grammar for and the map's first line says so (`unindexed="ml:793,mli:607,…"` on a facebook/infer clone); a file it indexed but cannot vouch for carries a parse-health row; every file the crawl passed over is itemized with its reason. A confident-looking map that lies by omission is the failure mode this tool refuses.
[What it misses, and what to run next →](#what-it-misses-and-what-to-run-next) ### Graph-Ranked Retrieval: It finds the right files more often than the alternatives
58.3% against 40.0% for the best tool tested, and it answers before they finish indexing — N = 60 paired, zero exclusions, every arm re-run on one day **58.3% against 40.0% for the best tool tested — and it answers before they finish indexing.** Every arm below was re-run in full on 2026-08-08 — one ripwire binary (the profile-guided release build that now ships), one evaluator, one 60-instance held-out LocBench slice: paired, zero exclusions, same gold set, and the metric code imported unmodified into every arm. *Strict file@10 = **all** gold files inside the top 10*, which is whether your agent starts in the right place at all.
| Round 4 — LocBench, Python-dominant | strict file@10 | any@10 | index (median) | query (median) | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | **ripwire `--for`** | **58.3%** | **85.0%** | **0.31 s** | 0.108 s | | codebase-memory-mcp 0.9.0 | 40.0% | 63.3% | 1.24 s | 0.075 s | | repowise 0.37.0 | 33.3% | 53.3% | 34.0 s | 1.159 s | | graphify 0.9.34 | 31.7% | 46.7% | 7.82 s | 0.614 s | | Aider repo-map 0.86.2 | 20.0% | 35.0% | *(inside query)* | 2.920 s | | codeseek 0.1.31 (better of its two arms) | 15.0% | 20.0% | 3.37 s | 0.040 s |
What this table costs us — six paired losses named, a runner-up we had under-credited at 26.7% and corrected to 40.0%, and the multi-file stratum no arm solves Ripwire leads every arm on both accuracy metrics and in both strata. Paired, the losses are small and they are published: **2** instances to codebase-memory-mcp, **2** to repowise, **1** each to graphify and aider. **Cold from nothing to an answer — parse, rank, reply, no cache — ripwire takes 0.213 s**, against a ~35 s index-then-query for repowise; its worst single index in this run was **352 s**. Three things this table costs us, said plainly. **codebase-memory-mcp is the real runner-up at 40.0%, not repowise** — an earlier round credited it with 26.7%, and re-running it fairly raised it. The margin over the best competitor is therefore **1.46×**, not the 1.75× two separately-dated tables used to imply. And **multi-file gold is hard for everyone**: ripwire leads the stratum at 21.4% strict, but its own any@10 there is 78.6% — it finds *a* gold file and misses the siblings, and no arm in this table solves that. Held out wider — **243 instances across 78 repositories** — ripwire lands **60.9%** against **27.6%** for its own pre-routing baseline: **+33.3pp** paired, clustered-bootstrap 95% lower bound **+25.0pp**, bought for +3.4% warm latency and **−39.4%** tokens. Full provenance, the losing instances one by one, and a third round against a compression-layer competitor: [Measured](#measured) and [`bench/headtohead/r4-2026-08-06/`](bench/headtohead/r4-2026-08-06/), whose harness is committed so anyone can re-run the whole comparison. Test scaffolding does not pollute the ranking from inside source files either: `#[cfg(test)] mod tests`, `describe()` blocks, `Test*` classes and `[Fact]` attributes are detected syntactically, wherever they live — not by file path alone. On an astral-sh/ruff clone (5,945 files), `--ignore-tests` removes **23,907** test symbols where path rules alone caught 18,532 (`ripwire --ignore-tests`, 2026-08-14; the per-language fixtures are pinned by `test/testscopecheck.sh`).
--- *The table above, read two other ways. Every figure in both is one of its measured numbers; only the manners and the cynicism are editorial.*
📖  The same table, as narrated by Jane Austen
*A Survey of the Neighbourhood's Eligible Instruments — being an account of five gentlemen of retrieval, and one lady of no pretension whatsoever.* It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an engineer in possession of a large repository must be in want of a map. **Mrs. Codebase-Memory** must be named first, for she has risen a great deal in the estimation of the neighbourhood — two-fifths of her answers entirely correct, which is more than any other caller can say, and she is ready in a second and a quarter. It must nevertheless be recorded that her card announces accomplishments in the semantic line; that upon enquiry the semantic line is not at home; and that the household denies all knowledge of it. One is left with the impression of a capable woman ill-served by whoever prints her cards. **Mr. Repowise** is by common consent the most substantial of the party, and no one who has waited upon him would dispute it. He is possessed of a handsome index and a manner of great thoroughness; but he must be *seen to*. One does not simply address Mr. Repowise. One sends word, and dresses, and waits — three-and-thirty seconds on an ordinary morning, and upon one memorable occasion in the country, seven minutes and four seconds — during which interval a less consequential neighbour has answered the question, taken her leave, and thought no more about it. He answers creditably when at last he arrives, one time in three; whether that is worth the toilette, each family must determine for itself. **Mr. Graphify** enjoys a great many admirers. He does not rank his acquaintances; he calls upon them in whatever order his walk happens to take him, and reports the order of the walk as though it were an opinion. He has been known to arrive carrying a hundred and thirty megabytes of correspondence. Pressed once for any answer at all, he replied that no matching nodes were found, and considered the matter closed. **Mr. Aider** is the most gentlemanly of the company and by far the most difficult to consult. He cannot be asked a question — the thing is simply not done. One may mention names in his hearing and hope he takes the hint; he does take it, and is fully ten points the better for it, which says more about the hint than about Mr. Aider. But he forms his view of the neighbourhood before you speak and retains it after, and one cannot escape the feeling that the conversation was never truly with you. **Mr. Codeseek** is a young gentleman of quick habits who suffers from an affliction of address. Speak to him plainly, in the language of ordinary complaint, and he will regard you with perfect composure and say nothing whatever — nothing, upon sixty occasions out of sixty. Name a person precisely as that person is named, and he grows animated directly. It is not stupidity; it is a want of imagination in the matter of introductions. And there is **ripwire**, of whom nothing is said in the drawing rooms, because she has already gone home. She was asked; she answered, in thirteen hundredths of a second; every gold file within the first ten, in eight-and-fifty cases of the hundred. She keeps no establishment, corresponds with no distant authority, and has never once been indexed at a party. Mr. Repowise finds her abrupt. She is. Every figure above is a measured number from the round-4 table on this page: the index medians (1.24 s, 34.0 s, 3.37 s) and repowise's 352 s worst case, the 40.0% and 33.3% strict file@10, the 0-results-on-60/60 fallback arm, the absent semantic_query tool, graphify's 129 MB largest graph and its 1-of-60 empty ranking, aider's +10 pp personalization delta, and ripwire's 0.108 s / 58.3%. Provenance in bench/headtohead/r4-2026-08-06/ and docs/EVALS.md; only the manners are editorial. These are other people's real work, and the joke is aimed at the trade-offs, never at the authors.
🕵️  The same table, worked as a case file — a private eye who trusts no index he didn't build himself
*The Long Index — in which a man asks six informants one simple question, and only one of them has the decency to answer it.* It was a million lines of somebody else's mistakes, and I needed one file out of it before the coffee went cold. So I did what you do. I went and talked to the people who say they know the neighborhood. **Codebase-Memory** had the best record in the room and she knew it — two answers right out of every five, handed over in a second and a quarter, which in this business is practically a kindness. Trouble was the card. Right under her name it said *semantic query*, real classy, real expensive-looking. I asked to see it. She said it wasn't in. I asked the house. The house had never heard of it. I've known a lot of good people ruined by whoever printed their cards. **Repowise** was the heavyweight — everybody told me so before I got through the door. Big index, good tailoring, thorough as a tax man. Only you don't just ask Repowise a question. You send word. You wait. Thirty-three seconds on a good day, and one bad morning out in the country, seven minutes and four seconds — long enough to get the same answer somewhere else, drive home, and forget his name. He came through one time in three. For some outfits that's worth the wait. I've got a metabolism. **Graphify** never met a fact he wouldn't hand you. Ask him one thing and he turns up with a hundred and twenty-nine megabytes of everything, unsorted, in whatever order he tripped over it — and he'll report that order like it's a considered opinion. It isn't. Leaned on him once for anything at all; he looked me dead in the eye, said no matching nodes, and figured we were square. **Aider** was a gentleman, which is another way of saying you couldn't file a straight question into him in triplicate. Wouldn't be asked. You mention things, loud, and hope — and sure enough, drop the right names and he's ten points sharper, which tells you everything about the names and nothing about Aider. He'd made up his mind about the place before I opened mine, and kept it after. You never did feel the conversation was with you. **Codeseek** was young and had a condition. Talk to him like a human being — plain, tired, the way a man actually asks for help — and he'll look clean through you and say nothing. Sixty times out of sixty, nothing. But name the thing exactly, badge number and all, and the kid lights right up. It isn't that he's slow. He just never learned how people knock on a door. And **ripwire**. Nobody at the table brought her up, on account of she'd already left. Took the question, answered it in thirteen hundredths of a second — every file I needed inside the first ten, fifty-eight times out of a hundred — keeps no office, wires no head branch, never once got herself indexed at a party. Repowise says she's abrupt. She is. That's why I hired her. Every figure above is a measured number from the round-4 table on this page: the index medians (1.24 s, 3.37 s, 34.0 s), repowise's 352 s / six-minute worst case, the 40.0% and 33.3% strict file@10, codeseek's 0-of-60 plain-language arm, codebase-memory's advertised-but-absent semantic tool, graphify's 129 MB largest graph and its 1-in-60 empty return, aider's +10 pp name-drop delta, and ripwire's 0.108 s / 58.3%. Provenance in bench/headtohead/r4-2026-08-06/ and docs/EVALS.md; only the cynicism is editorial. These are other people's real work, and the joke is aimed at the trade-offs, never the authors.
---
Name a symbol and it is the first hit — routing lifts recall@1 61.1% → 91.3%; route everything to the name lane and prose queries collapse 0.967 → 0.016 MRR. Both numbers ship together **Name a symbol and it is the first hit — and it is never a mystery which ranker answered.** Every `--for` query is served by one of three lanes; a confidence-gated router picks by reading the query's *shape*, discloses its choice on the output (`route=`), and `--no-route` overrides it. Routing lifts recall@1 on name-shaped queries **61.1% → 91.3%** in `src/`, **59.2% → 85.5%** at the repository root — and the gate is load-bearing in both directions: route *everything* to the name lane and prose queries collapse from **0.967 MRR to 0.016**. Both numbers ship together. Reproduce with `ripwire --eval-retrieval`, which grades EVERY doc-commented symbol in the corpus and prints its own `population=`/`scored=`/`rule=`; the full per-ranker tables are in [`bench/ANSWERQUALITY.md`](bench/ANSWERQUALITY.md#re-measured-2026-09-05--census-sampler-midrank-ties-the-current-numbers).
| Lane | Built for | Why it wins there | Where it loses | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | **name-exact** | identifier-shaped queries (`chooseForRanker`, `pack task`) | whole-name match ignores body noise: **91.3%** recall@1, **0.960** MRR in `src/` | scores zero on any word that is not literally a name — forced onto prose it dies (**0.016** MRR) | | **subtoken+body** | prose and task queries ("where is the content hash computed") | the only lane that matches vocabulary living in doc comments and bodies | exact names drown in shared subtokens (**61.1%** recall@1 on name queries) | | **mention anchor** | a pasted path, `Type.method`, or issue URL | a literal mention is lifted above any score — paste the ticket, don't paraphrase it | adds nothing when the query names no artifact |
How each lane finds things, and how the router picks — step by step
**How the conceptual lane finds what you didn't name.** The subtoken+body lane is why a query with no symbol name in it still lands: - **Both sides are split into subtokens.** `SplitChunksPlugin` becomes `split`+`chunks`+`plugin`, and so does your query — so words match *pieces* of names you never typed. - **Three evidence fields, not one.** A symbol is scored on its name subtokens, its doc comment, and its body — vocabulary that only exists in a comment or an implementation still finds its symbol. - **BM25 with per-query IDF.** Rare, discriminating words dominate the score; words the whole corpus shares contribute almost nothing. Type the three words only the right function uses and they carry the query. - **Lookalikes are down-weighted, not hidden.** Fixture, test-data, and generated paths score at a fraction, so a test vocabulary-twin cannot outrank the real source (adversarial-class pollution@5: 28% → 0%, `docs/EVALS.md` §4) — but they stay in the index and are still found when *asked for*. - **The list ends at a cliff, not a quota.** The cut is adaptive: output stops where the scores drop off, so a sharp answer is a short list and a diffuse one is disclosed as such, instead of a fixed top-k padding both. **How the router picks.** The gate is built on cheap, corpus-derived evidence, and its bias reflects an asymmetry the table above makes plain: a *missed* name-route costs a few ranks; a *false* one is catastrophic (0.016 MRR). 1. **Identifier shape is trusted outright.** A camelCase/snake token — or a short query carrying one — routes name-exact. Someone who types `chooseForRanker` is naming, not describing. 2. **The all-words test.** If *every* content word equals some symbol's whole name (`pack task` where both `pack` and `task` are real symbols), that is strong evidence of a name query. 3. **The plausibility test.** Present is not enough — each matched name must be *specific*: few definitions, and not a subtoken carried by half the corpus's symbol names (thresholds derived from the index itself, not a hardcoded stdlib list). This is what catches `split chunks`: every word names a symbol, but `split` names a String method defined everywhere — so the route is **declined** and the conceptual lane runs, which finds `SplitChunksPlugin` easily. 4. **Every decision is disclosed.** `route=` states the lane that ran; a decline names the anchor that failed and why. `--no-route` forces the conceptual lane when you disagree. The proof the gate earns its keep: the routed lane matches the *best* single lane on both query modes simultaneously — 0.960 MRR on names (equal to forced name-exact) and 0.967 on prose (within noise of pure subtoken+body, `src/`). No single lane does that. The honest boundary: the router classifies the query's shape — it cannot rescue vocabulary that is not in the index. A prose query whose concept lives only in a compound class name (`SplitChunksPlugin` contains no `splits` subtoken) is correctly sent to the conceptual lane, which then has little to grab; that gap is measured and recorded in [docs/EVALS.md §7](docs/EVALS.md), not hidden. Numbers re-derived 2026-08-08 on this tree; per-lane table and history in [docs/EVALS.md §4](docs/EVALS.md).
### Saves Tokens: It answers for a fraction of the context
5.0% of what a grep-and-read pass spends — 5.2% on the questions both arms fully answered, and a dedicated context compressor run over the output saved exactly 0 tokens On mid-task questions it had never seen, ripwire answers at **5.0%** of what a grep-and-read pass spends — **5.2%** on the questions both arms fully answered. `--pack-signatures` returns **74.7% fewer bytes** than full bodies at top-50 (re-derived on this tree, 2026-09-06). The output is already dense enough that running a dedicated context compressor over it saved **exactly 0 tokens**.
Why both figures are printed — 7.3% → 5.0% overall, but 1.7% → 5.2% on the questions both arms answered Both of those first two figures moved when they were re-derived on 2026-08-23, and they moved in **opposite** directions — 7.3% → 5.0% overall, but 1.7% → 5.2% on the both-answered subset. Same frozen questions, same frozen verb ladders, same corpus pin, same tokenizer; the naive arm reproduced to the token. What changed is where ripwire spends: the compact conceptual route made its *misses* much cheaper, while richer default bundles made the questions it *answers* dearer. Both numbers are printed because printing only the one that improved would be the failure this project exists to not commit. The full per-question re-derivation is in the Round 3 note under [Measured](#measured). It is also cheap enough to call on reflex: this repository parses in **~0.15 s** cold and **~0.10 s** warm (`time ./build/ripwire . --no-cache`), so the agent asks instead of guessing.
### Where it pays most, and where it does not
A map is a fixed cost paid once per context — strongest of all under an orchestrator that matches tasks to models: every lane it spawns starts cold on the same tree. It pays again on the checking pass, and it does not pay on a question one grep already answers **A map is a fixed cost paid once per context, so it pays in proportion to what that context goes on to do with it.** Two shapes get the most out of it, and one gets nothing. - **Orienting a context that does not know the repository.** This is the strongest case, and it is strongest of all under an orchestrator that matches tasks to models: every lane it spawns starts cold on the same tree, and each one would otherwise re-derive the same structure from scratch. The map is the one artifact that does not have to be rediscovered per agent. - **The checking pass at the end.** `--quality-delta`, `--test-gate` and `--edit-check` answer questions — *what did I make worse, which tests must run, did I change a contract* — that an agent cannot answer by reading more source, at any budget. - **It does not pay on a question one `grep` already answers.** The map is charged whether or not it was needed, so a narrow lookup in a file you can already name is cheaper without it. `--help-task` exists to make that call, and a flat ranking says `confidence="low"` rather than pretending.
**Getting the saving takes three things, and a bare `--for` is none of them.**
The three controls that decide what it costs — a budget (--token-budget / --top-k), routing (--help-task), and the skills that teach an agent when not to reach for it 1. **A budget.** `--token-budget=N` caps the bundle; `--top-k=N` caps the rows. Unbudgeted `--for` returns a rich terminal bundle by design — right when it ends the question, wasteful when it does not. 2. **Routing.** `ripwire . --help-task=""` names the ONE command the task actually wants, and abstains when the evidence is thin. It is advice, it never runs anything. An answer of "just grep for it" is a correct answer and the tool will give it. 3. **The skills.** `skills/install.sh` teaches an agent *when* to reach for which verb. Without them an agent has 175 flags and no map of which moment each is for, and it will reach for the map every time — including the times it should not.
What is measured and what is not — these are single-agent figures; that the saving grows with the number of cold orientations is pre-registered and unrun, not a published result **What is measured and what is not.** The per-question figures above and in [Measured](#measured) are single-agent measurements. That the saving grows with the number of cold orientations follows from the fixed-cost mechanism but is **not a published result** — it is pre-registered and unrun. Treat the single-agent numbers as the measured ones.
### Better Code: It automates the review judgments nobody has time to make — every lens from published research
Six independent evidence families, each implementing published work — the largest correlation between any two is +0.168, which is what makes agreement corroboration rather than one metric counted twice `--quality-panel` runs the calls a good reviewer makes by hand — is this function too tangled, is it named badly, does it hide control flow inside an idiom, does its history say it keeps breaking, must you read five other files to follow it, does it mutate state three hops away — as **six independent evidence families**, and ranks by how many of them *agree*, never as one blended score. Each family implements published work — McCabe on shape, Butler on naming, Gopstein's atoms of confusion on idiom, Nagappan & Ball on churn, Beck & Diehl on colocation, Henry & Kafura on state — with the lesson taken from each paper, and the rules measured and *withdrawn*, in [`docs/LINEAGE.md`](docs/LINEAGE.md). Pooled over five corpora (n = 27,889) the largest correlation between any two families is **+0.168**: they really are measuring different things, so two families firing on the same function is corroboration rather than one metric counted twice.
Why this matters most for code an agent wrote — empty-catch masking +47%, rewritten-within-two-weeks +15%, and reuse declining That matters most for code an agent wrote. Empty-catch error masking is **+47%** more common in AI-authored commits, a function rewritten again inside two weeks **+15%** more likely, and reuse is *declining* as AI's share of commits grows (GitClear, *AI Copilot Code Quality*, 2026). Each of `--quality-delta`'s 10 kinds targets one measured mode like those, and it reports **only what your change made worse** — then `--exemplar` shows the pattern in your own repo to copy, and `--test-gate` names the tests that must run before "done."
Reproducing all of it — dated, sourced measurements in docs/EVALS.md, each with its instrument, its corpus and its counterexamples, because the losses ship beside the wins Tree-local numbers above are reproducible with the commands shown; the rest are dated, sourced measurements in [`docs/EVALS.md`](docs/EVALS.md) — each with its instrument, its corpus, and its counterexamples, because the losses ship beside the wins. Zero runtime dependencies, C++23, builds with the network off.
Built for **Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Gemini, opencode, aider**, and any agent that can call a CLI.
What comes back — real output from this repository, pretty-printed and trimmed (re-captured 2026-09-05; rows are served in rank order, each naming its file) ```xml incremental cache (--cache): per-file content hash + raw facts so a re-run re-parses ONLY c…constexpr std::uint32_t kCacheMagic = 0x4b505443 Composed exactly the way every OTHER blob family is (quality.h): one fixed-width identity hex pe…inline std::string spanTierMemoPath( const std::string& diskPath ) Ingest the tree at `sha`, materialized out of `root`'s object store. …inline bool ingestCommitTree( const std::string& root, const std::string& sha, … ) P1-15 — the `_reingest` envelope field for a response whose handling ran an INCREMENTAL pass, …inline bool mcpRefreshedThisRequest( std::uint64_t passesAtEntry ) … … ``` The cache cluster, ranked and annotated in place: `cx`/`ccx` complexity, `in` reuse count, `churn` recent commits, `amp` change amplification, `tested` coverage — the fragile spots are visible *before* the agent touches them, in a few thousand tokens (`est_tokens="3995"`, self-reported in the header) instead of five whole files. This is a *conceptual* query, so the bundle is the **compact** shape: the ranked map plus one-hop callee edges, no inline bodies, and the root says so rather than leaving you to notice. Read the map, then `--expand=SYM` the one you want — or pass `--auto-bodies` to get bodies inline as before.
What the quality panel shows — real output from this repository, trimmed (legend comment elided) ```xml $ ripwire . --quality-panel --limit=1 … ``` Four of six independent evidence families corroborate on `buildGraph`, each with its own reason shown inline — never a single blended score. `eligible="6497"` narrows to `ranked="524"` (2-of-6 agreement): an **8.1%** shortlist of this repository's own functions, not a guess (re-derived 2026-08-23 — the corpus grew, the shortlist share did not move). Full six-family breakdown, real numbers per family → [The quality panel](#the-quality-panel) below.
Full retrieval tables — including the MRR figures behind the router numbers above — in [`bench/ANSWERQUALITY.md`](bench/ANSWERQUALITY.md) and [Measured](#measured).

Three slides from the ripwire showcase deck: the head-to-head table, the ten-moments token table, and the quality-panel calibration

▶ The whole tool in 29 slides — every figure names the instrument that pins it
renders in your browser · pptx beside it · the numbers behind it

[What it answers](#what-it-answers) · [Quickstart](#quickstart) · [The quality panel](#the-quality-panel) · [Benchmarks](#measured) · [Honesty contract](#the-honesty-contract) · [Agent setup](#set-it-up-in-your-coding-agent) · [Docs](#documentation) --- ## What it answers
179 long flags across seven families, plus the MCP server — and --help-task names the ONE command a task wants, or abstains honestly when the evidence is too thin Around the core sit 179 long flags advertised in `--help`, across seven families — plus an MCP server, so a coding agent can call any of them mid-task instead of grepping and reading whole files. Not sure which of them fits the task in front of you? `ripwire . --help-task=""` recommends ONE executable command with the evidence behind the pick — advice only, it never runs the recommendation — and abstains honestly when the evidence is too thin to name a winner.
Which surface is the authority — --help vs docs/COMMANDS.md — and the four reflex verbs worth memorising `./build/ripwire --help` is generated from the binary's own flag table and is always the authority; [`docs/COMMANDS.md`](docs/COMMANDS.md) documents every one of the 145 documented flags — 94 of them with a real invocation and its recorded output (counts re-derived 2026-08-23; `test/docscommandscheck.sh` fails if that documented set and the binary's own flag table ever disagree). Each family below links there. Four reflexes worth wiring into muscle memory: `--from-trace=FILE` for an error you have in hand, `--edit-check=SYM` right after an edit (did the contract change, and which callers are now provably incompatible), `--merge-scout=REF1,REF2` before landing parallel branches, and `--pack-task="…"` for ranking, bodies, callers and tests in one budgeted bundle.
| Family | The question | Representative flags | | --- | --- | --- | | [**understand a codebase cold**](docs/COMMANDS.md#understand-a-codebase-cold) | "What is this repo, and what matters in it?" | `--for` · `--help-task` · `--tree` · `--lego` · `--exemplar` · `--recall` · `--top-k` · `--token-budget` · `--max-tokens` | | [**navigate / answer a question**](docs/COMMANDS.md#navigate--answer-a-question) | "Who calls this? Is it safe to change? Which tests?" | `--callers` · `--callees` · `--uses` · `--impact` · `--path` · `--connect` · `--affected` · `--situ` · `--test-gate` · `--grep` | | [**zoom the detail ladder**](docs/COMMANDS.md#zoom-the-detail-ladder) | "Show me more — but only where it pays." | `--detail` · `--pack-signatures` · `--outline` · `--expand` · `--compress` | | [**assess quality / structure**](docs/COMMANDS.md#assess-quality--structure) | "Where is the risk, and did I just add some?" | `--quality-panel` · `--hotspots` · `--clones` · `--metrics` · `--deps` · `--lint` · `--quality-delta` · `--dmm` · `--edit-check` · `--pr-context` · `--merge-scout` | | [**self-diagnosis**](docs/COMMANDS.md#self-diagnosis) | "Is my setup actually working?" | `--doctor` | | [**security**](docs/COMMANDS.md#--scan-skillsdir) | "Is this agent skill file safe to install?" | `--scan-skill` · `--scan-skills` | | [**knobs / modes**](docs/COMMANDS.md#knobs--modes) | shape, format, cache, budget | `--json` · `--format` · `--mcp` | --- ## Quickstart
Prebuilt binary — macOS and Linux (arm64 / x86-64, built for RHEL 8+), SHA-256 verified, shipping seventeen agent skills the installer activates for every agent it detects **Prebuilt binary** — macOS (arm64 / x86-64) and Linux (arm64 / x86-64, built for **RHEL 8+**; every release is smoke-tested on a RHEL 9 userland before it publishes). Downloads the latest [GitHub Release](https://github.com/redhat-et/ripwire/releases), verifies its SHA-256, and installs to `~/.local/bin`. From v0.2.2 the release tarball also ships the seventeen agent skills, and the installer stages them under `~/.local/share/ripwire/skills` **and activates them for every agent it detects** (Claude Code, Codex), printing one line per agent saying what it did. Sixteen of the seventeen are for using the tool; the one about compiling ripwire itself (`ripwire-opt-remarks`, `audience: contributor` in its front matter) stays staged unless you pass `--contributor` to `skills/install.sh`. An agent that is not installed is never given a skills directory, hooks are never registered without an explicit `--hook`, and `RIPWIRE_NO_ACTIVATE=1` stages without activating for image builds. When no agent is detected the activation one-liner is printed instead: ```bash RIPWIRE_REPO=redhat-et/ripwire bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/redhat-et/ripwire/main/scripts/install.sh)" export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH" # not on PATH by default on macOS or most Linux shells; add it to your rc file ```
**Building it yourself needs CMake 3.24+ and a C++23 compiler, and nothing else installed first** — every dependency is vendored in-tree, so the build completes with the network off. ```bash git clone https://github.com/redhat-et/ripwire.git cd ripwire cmake -S . -B build && cmake --build build -j ./build/ripwire . --max-tokens=3000 # the ranked map — start here on an unfamiliar repo (bare it is ~22 KB here; this keeps the head at ~6 KB) ```
Why there is no download step — vendored grammars, the offline-build proof, the languages parsed, and putting it on PATH **Or build from source.** Requirements: CMake 3.24+ and a C++23 compiler — that means clang 16+ / AppleClang 15+ (Xcode 15) / gcc 13+ / MSVC 19.36+, and if your distro's CMake is older than 3.24, `pip install cmake` or `brew install cmake` gets a current one everywhere. Nothing else — tree-sitter's core, the grammars listed in [THIRD_PARTY.md](THIRD_PARTY.md) and the test framework are vendored under `third_party/deps`, so there is no download step and no package manager to satisfy. Prove that with the network off: add `-DFETCHCONTENT_FULLY_DISCONNECTED=ON` and the build still completes. Two builds, two jobs — pick by what you are doing: ```bash # building to USE it — the fast binary (Release implies LTO; scripts/pgobuild.sh adds PGO, what CI ships) cmake -S . -B build-release -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release && cmake --build build-release -j # building to WORK ON it — plain configure, no build type (why that matters: the trap, under the fold below) cmake -S . -B build && cmake --build build -j ``` See [Languages](#languages) for supported source and document formats. To put it on `PATH`, `./install.sh` builds and atomically installs the binary plus the matching `skills/` and `hooks/` assets into a detected prefix (Homebrew's if present, `~/.local` otherwise; override with `RIPWIRE_INSTALL_PREFIX`). Set `RIPWIRE_ACTIVATE_CODEX=1` to also refresh Codex's skill links and advisory hooks from that same staged version; activation is otherwise explicit.
Wiring it into your agent takes one more minute — `wrap` **prints** the recipe for your client, it never edits your config: ```bash ripwire wrap claude # prints: claude mcp add ripwire -- ripwire --mcp ripwire wrap --all # detect every installed agent, print each one's recipe skills/install.sh --codex # Codex CLI: the task-shaped skills that say when to query — and when to stop ``` Four commands worth learning first: ```bash ripwire . --max-tokens=3000 # the ranked map — start here (bare it is ~22 KB / ~9K est_tokens on this repo; this keeps the head at ~6 KB / ~2.5K) ripwire . --for="incremental cache invalidation" # the task lens: what to touch, ranked ripwire . --callers=someFunction # who calls it ripwire . --test-gate # before you commit: which tests must run ```
CLI or MCP, the -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release trap, and the honesty contract in one line The CLI is the recommended baseline because it works in every shell-capable agent; the MCP server is optional, for agents whose workflow benefits from persistent tool registration. Full walkthrough, all six clients: [Agent setup](#set-it-up-in-your-coding-agent). > **The trap, spelled out:** never configure the *dev* tree (`build/`) with > `-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release`. Release defines `NDEBUG`, which compiles the degrade-path alerts out > and blinds the gates that assert them — and every gate and bench number is measured against > `build/`, so changing that tree's flavour silently moves all of them at once. Release belongs in > its own tree (`build-release/` above; `./install.sh` builds its own `build-install/` the same way). > CI builds both flavours on purpose — see [`CONTRIBUTING.md`](CONTRIBUTING.md). **The honesty contract, in one line:** every count ripwire cannot prove is a total ships labelled a floor, every truncation is disclosed where it happens, and a zero means *none found* — never *none exists*. Two runs over the same tree are byte-identical, and a warm run equals a cold one. That is a contract, gated on every pull request and every push to main, not a tendency. [The full discipline — and the losses published next to the wins →](#the-honesty-contract)
--- ## The quality panel
4,956 eligible functions on this repository, and 2-of-6 agreement leaves 401 worth a second look — an 8.1% shortlist **Six independent evidence families, ranked by how many of them agree — never one blended score.** Pointed at this repository's **4,956** eligible functions, 2-of-6 agreement leaves **401** worth a second look: an **8.1%** shortlist. Pooled over five corpora (n = 27,889) no two families correlate above **+0.168**, which is what makes agreement corroboration rather than one metric counted twice.
What each family actually looks at — on this repository's own source, not a synthetic example: | Family | Question | Backing verb | On this repo | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | **structural** | shape: complexity, size, nesting *and how much of the body is deep*, params, local-variable count — absolute bars, not a ranking | `--metrics` | `buildGraph` (`src/graph.h:462`): `ccx=698 loc=1244 nest=8 humps=30 deep=283 locals=114` — **114 local variables invisible to every quality lens until this session**, because naming/size analysis has always stopped at a function's signature; `locals=` is a disclosed floor (`locals_floor="1"`), threaded through the same walk that already computes `ccx`/`nest`, at zero extra parsing cost | | **lexical** | identifier text: the 10 `naming-*` lint rules (short, wordy, case-mixed, uninformative, …) | `--lint`, `--naming-consistency`, `--lint --naming-locals` | see below — the one family with a fix, not just evidence | | **confusion** | syntactic idiom: the 7 `atom-*` rules (implicit predicates, nested ternaries, embedded `++`/`--`, …) | `--lint` | corpus-wide finding counts, not a per-function claim to spotlight here | | **historical** | git change frequency — `score = churn × cognitive complexity` | `--hotspots` | `src/main.cpp`: `churn=42 ccx=3387 score=142254` — top of `--hotspots`' ranking, and its own worst function (`main`, `ccx=387`) is where developers keep working *and* the code is hardest. One caveat the panel's own legend states and this table must too: churn is measured **per file**, so every symbol in a file carries that file's `churn=`/`hrank=` verbatim — this family is file evidence *inherited* by the row, never the row's own history | | **colocation** (local reasoning) | how much you must read that isn't in front of you | `--context-ratio` | `computeQualityDelta` (`src/mcpverbs.h:2031`), ~50 lines, **87.0%** of its distinct references resolve outside its own file — by the tokens a reader must actually read, **99.6%**. A refinement of Beck & Diehl's per-class congruence (FSE 2011); Martin's instability `I = Ce/(Ca+Ce)` is its cruder ancestor | | **state** (unintended side effects) | mutable state a change here can perturb, that `--impact` (who calls you) never asks about | `--nonlocal-state` | `ensure_global_init` (`src/infra/profilePmc.h:288`) reaches 3 distinct global/static cells through its own body and callees — a tiny, innocent-looking call site can still break state three hops away. Unsound by construction (no pointer aliasing, no indirect calls), so every count is a floor |
How the six families are joined, the churn caveat, and the nest= profile deep-dive `--quality-panel` joins **six independent evidence families** (structural shape, lexical naming, syntactic-confusion idioms, git churn history, cross-file colocation, and non-local mutable state) and ranks by the *count* of families agreeing, never a weighted composite — averaging correlated metrics and calling it several is the Maintainability Index's well-known failure mode. On this repository the panel measures **4,956** eligible functions and narrows them to **401** worth a second look at 2-of-6 agreement — an **8.1%** shortlist, not a guess — and the largest correlation between any two families, pooled across five independent corpora (n = 27,889), is **+0.168**: the families really are measuring different things. The six-family table above shows what each finds on this repository's own source; the sections below are the parts that need more than a row. ### `nest=` is a max, so it cannot tell a long function from a tangled one The structural family's `nest=` reports the single deepest line in a function. One line at depth 9 and a thousand lines at depth 9 produce the same number — which means a long **blocked-sequential** body (a run of shallow scoped steps, its max set by one inner loop nobody has to hold in their head) is indistinguishable from a **tangled** one that sustains depth for hundreds of lines. Every consumer of `nest=` inherited that blindness: the panel's structural family, `--readability`'s rank, the ensemble join. `--metrics` now emits the **profile** beside the max — `humps=` (how many maximal regions reach the nesting bar, CodeScene's "bumpy road": a rise above the threshold then a fall, so repeated missing abstractions read differently from one deep tangle) and `deep=` (how many lines lie inside them, against the `loc=` already on the row). Both come from the same fused walk that already computes `ccx`/`nest`, at zero extra parsing cost; `deep=` is a disclosed floor (`deep_floor="1"`). Both are **absent** exactly when `nest <` the bar — not-deep, never a hidden `0`. `deep` counts **lines** and `humps` counts **regions**, and two regions can share a line — a one-line `if(c){x;}else{y;}` at the bar is two regions on one line — so `deep` below `humps` is legal output rather than a defect. On this repository's own source: | function | `loc` | `nest` | `humps` | `deep` | deep/loc | reading | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | `ingest` (`src/ingest.cpp`) | 1632 | 8 | 25 | 467 | **29%** | genuinely tangled | | `buildGraph` (`src/graph.h`) | 1244 | 9 | 30 | 308 | **25%** | genuinely tangled | | `main` (`src/main.cpp`) | 1061 | 6 | 29 | 111 | **10%** | long, mostly shallow steps | | `dispatchMcpLine` (`src/mcp.h`) | 1099 | 7 | 22 | 102 | **9%** | a dispatch table, not a tangle | | `runDefaultMap` (`src/main.cpp`) | 650 | 4 | 7 | 15 | **2%** | blocked-sequential | | `ur_walkTree` (`src/ingest.cpp`) | 87 | 7 | 1 | 43 | **49%** | *small* and tangled | `loc` and `nest` alone rank `main` and `dispatchMcpLine` beside `ingest` and `buildGraph`; the profile separates them, and it promotes `ur_walkTree` — 87 lines, so no size bar fires, yet proportionally the densest thing in the table. **This changes no ranking**: `humps > 0` is exactly `nest >= bar`, which is precisely when the `nest` bar already fired, so the family count and the panel's shortlist are untouched. It is strictly more evidence on rows that already appear — a reader can tell the two shapes apart without opening the file. The panel also carries **one join, and it is deliberately not a seventh family**: a row whose structural evidence includes `deep=` (a body that *sustains* depth at the nesting bar) and that no indexed test reaches is annotated `join="deep+untested"` — the pair where a refactor is most wanted and least safe, put side by side because both facts are already on the row. It changes nothing: not `fam=`, not `of=`, not the order, not which rows appear (counting it would be the structural family wearing a second hat). The root reports `tested_scope=` (symbols any indexed test reaches — the join's honest denominator) and `deep_untested=` (rows carrying the annotation across the whole row set); at `tested_scope="0"` no indexed test reaches *anything* here, so "untested" would be a fact about what was crawled rather than about the code, and the annotation is emitted on **no** row.
**Five lenses sit *beside* the six-family join — deliberately outside its vote.** Each is out for a stated reason, not an oversight: | Lens | Asks | Why beside the join | On this repo | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | `--field-affinity` | which struct fields are read together but declared far apart; each loop's access shape (index vs pointer-chase) | its subject is a **type**, not a function — attributing a struct's finding to the functions touching it is a claim the lens never makes | `MainDispatch`: **12** findings at separation cost **92.88**; **1,374** loops classified, **5** genuine pointer-chases | | `cache-*` lint rules + `--with-profile` | cache-hostile access shapes (alloc-in-loop, `p=p->next`, `a[b[i]]`, node containers, …), then which are *measured* hot | rows are facts about **sites**, joined to per-scope hardware counters — not per-function evidence a family vote could count | aggressive rules: **0** hits in shipping `src/`; **327** findings adversarially triaged → **0** fix-worthy; the one open refactor settled by measurement (5.2 ms) | | `--readability` | least-readable-first ordering (Halstead volume, Posnett sigmoid) | the fitted score **saturates past 20 lines** — only the ordering is meaningful, and an ordering cannot vote in a count | ordering only, never a grade | | `--naming-consistency` | off-convention names, each with a computed `propose=` | the one lens that emits **advice** — a fix is not evidence, so it does not vote | camelCase dominant at **93.0%**; **136** names flagged with proposals | | `--lint --naming-locals` | the naming rules pointed at local variables inside already-flagged functions | **opt-in and unvalidated** — stays outside any join until a real-corpus audit clears it (the withdrawn-rule lesson) | +**973** findings that were structurally invisible before |
The depth on each lens — citations, caveats, and the withdrawn-rule note **Two verbs sit *beside* the panel, not inside its six-family join** — worth knowing the boundary rather than blurring it: - **`--field-affinity`** (cache-friendly co-access) is explicitly **not** a panel family, by unit: it measures which struct fields are read together but declared far apart, and its subject is a *type*, not a function — attributing a struct's finding to the functions that touch it would be a claim the lens itself never makes (`docs/EVALS.md` §9.9.2). `MainDispatch` (`src/main.cpp:1335`, the 144-byte struct threaded through nearly every verb) still carries **12** real findings against a separation cost of **92.88** — fields read together in the same call routinely cross cache-line boundaries. Chilimbi, Davidson & Larus's cache-conscious structure definition (PLDI 1999), validated on real hardware counters; the advice-not-transform posture (report a split, never auto-reorder a struct) follows Hundt, Mannarswamy & Chakrabarti (CGO 2006). **This is a genuinely rare kind of tool**: code review catches cache-unfriendly patterns constantly, but every adjacent tool that reasons about memory-access shape (Intel Advisor's pattern classifier, DMon, PerfLint) does it by *running the program first* — a two-round adversarial literature and patent search found no shipping tool and no published work that does this **statically, before a line executes** (tier: RARE BUT REAL, the full citation trail and hedged claim wording in [`docs/LINEAGE.md`](docs/LINEAGE.md)). The same verb now also classifies each loop's access shape — `index`/handle-based (predictable, the hardware prefetcher can hide the latency) vs. pointer-chase (data-dependent, no struct layout fixes an unhideable per-hop stall) — and, for genuine chases, checks whether the pointer you dereference to *reach* the next node sits next to the payload you're about to read, since that cache-line fetch is unavoidable and colocating there is a strictly higher-value fix than generic field reordering. On this repository: **1,374** loops classified, **5** genuine pointer-chases found in a codebase deliberately built handle-based rather than pointer-linked (guardrail G2) — the lens staying quiet on code written to avoid the problem is itself a check that it isn't firing at random. **Ships entirely report-only**: an A/B benchmark against a real 64 MB shuffled linked list measured a mostly-null result, so the ranking-affecting half of this feature is a provable no-op until a blind real-corpus validation session clears it — reported here at the same honesty level as everything else in this table, not oversold ahead of the evidence. - **The `cache-*` lint pack + `--with-profile`** (cache-friendly *access patterns* — the other half of the locality story, shipped 2026-08-07/08) covers what `--field-affinity` deliberately does not: eight AST shapes practitioners agree hurt — node-based containers, `vector`/vector-of-indirect (the "matrix as vector of vectors"), heap allocation inside loops, `p = p->next` chase advances, `a[b[i]]` gather subscripts, by-value `shared_ptr` parameters, and existing manual prefetches flagged for re-measurement — loop-fenced by span algebra, C-family only, facts never verdicts. The honesty numbers, both directions: on this repository the aggressive rules fire **only in benches and test fixtures, zero in shipping `src/`** (guardrail G2 holding is itself the check the rules aren't firing at random), and a 13-agent adversarial triage of all 327 findings confirmed **zero** as fix-worthy — every plausible refactor died on "win unmeasurable without a profile". That gap is exactly what **`--lint --with-profile=FILE`** closes: it joins a `RIPWIRE_PROFILE` build's own per-scope hardware counters (`#PROF_TSV`) onto findings, so a row carries `heat_total_ms` / `heat_l1d_mpki` from a real run — static shape × measured PMU weight, the two halves of SYZYGY's advice mode (Hundt, CGO 2006) finally in one command. Worked example: the one surviving refactor candidate (flattening the Louvain adjacency) was settled by its new `PROFILE_SCOPE` in a single measured run — **5.2 ms, 5.9% of the verb** — a wasted afternoon prevented by a number ([`docs/CACHELINT.md`](docs/CACHELINT.md) holds the full catalog, the wave-2 specs, and the compiler-handled myths deliberately *not* checked). - **`--readability`** is a sibling lens, not a panel family either — the one classic model in the tree with a published closed form: Halstead volume (Halstead, *Elements of Software Science*, 1977) and the Posnett/Hindle/Devanbu sigmoid fit (MSR 2011, [doi:10.1145/1985441.1985454](https://doi.org/10.1145/1985441.1985454)), fitted on snippets of 20 lines or fewer — past that the fitted score saturates and only the *ordering* stays meaningful, which is exactly how the verb is used: least-readable-first, never as a grade. Halstead's volume specifically (not the later, less-trusted difficulty/effort derivatives) is among the metrics shown to track measured cognitive load directly (Peitek, Apel, Parnin, Brechmann & Siegmund, ICSE 2021, [doi:10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00056](https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00056)) — `--readability` emits volume and stops there; difficulty and effort are computed nowhere in this tree. - **`--naming-consistency`** is the *lexical* family's one exception to "evidence, never advice": every other lens in this panel tells you WHAT is wrong, never a computed fix. Case-style consistency is the one property with a corpus-derivable answer — on this repository's `src/`, camelCase is the dominant convention at **1,677/1,803 (93.0%)** agreement, and the verb flags **136** off-convention names with a mechanically recombined `propose=` value for each (no dictionary, no synonym judgment — see [What it answers](#what-it-answers)). - **`--lint --naming-locals`** points those same naming rules at local variable names — the thing a human reviewer flags immediately in a sprawling function and no static tool measured until this session. Opt-in, off by default: on this repository, a plain `--lint` finds **2,225** findings; adding `--naming-locals` finds **3,198** — **973 findings that were structurally invisible** a moment ago, scoped tightly (only inside functions already flagged large/complex, only locals nested two blocks deep for the short-name rule) so it doesn't just relabel every loop counter in the tree. Ships disabled by default on purpose: this repository's own history includes a naming rule that shipped on plausibility and was later measured to flag its *best*-named functions — see the withdrawn-rule note below — so a rule this new stays opt-in until a real-corpus audit clears it.
The full citation table, the evidence tiers, and the naming rule that was withdrawn for flagging this repository's best-named functions Full citation table, evidence tiers, and what got measured and *withdrawn* (a naming rule that flagged this repository's best-named functions, kept as the standing argument for measuring before shipping) → [`docs/LINEAGE.md`](docs/LINEAGE.md).
--- ## Real runs
Four real invocations against this repository, printed as the binary actually prints them — including why --callers' count is a floor and what amb= admits **Four real invocations against this repository**, each printed as the binary actually prints it: `--callers` (and why its count is a floor), the default ranked map (and what `amb=` admits), `--test-gate` (exit 4 while obligations remain), and `--from-trace` (feed it the error itself, not a paraphrase of one).
How these excerpts were edited — minified output wrapped for reading, and exactly which numbers are elided Output is minified — one line, no whitespace between tags — so the excerpts below are wrapped for reading, and each one's leading legend comment is elided. Nothing else is edited, except that corpus-size numbers (file/symbol/edge counts, the ranked-map header's token/ambiguity tallies, PageRank `k=` values, and the test-gate example's `script_gates_unmodelled=` — a count of the script runners under `test/`, recursively) drift as this repository grows: **the ranked map** elides those specifically, and says so again at the point of use, and **the test gate** additionally trims its `` rows down to 2 of the 25 the real run prints, behind a trailing `…`.
--callers — a call graph built on the spot, and why count="6" ships labelled a floor **Ten seconds, no index server, no embeddings, no API key** — a parse and a call graph, built on the spot: ``` $ ripwire . --callers=rankGraphTeleport ``` `counts_floor="1"` is the point. Call edges are extracted from source text by name, so dynamic dispatch contributes no edge (a call through a function pointer or callback is an edge only when ONE function is bound to that variable in scope and the variable never escapes — its address taken or reference-bound — and a macro-generated call site — tagged `role="macro"` — only when its function-like `#define` is indexed): `count="6"` is a **floor**, and the element says so before you read a single row.
The default ranked map — --top-k=3, and what amb="2" admits about a resolver guess **The ranked map** — the default run, capped to three symbols so it fits here: ``` $ ripwire . --top-k=3 ``` `files=`/`symbols=`/`edges=` and the `k=` rank values are elided: this repository is the corpus here, so they move every time README.md itself gains or loses a line, which is not what the example demonstrates. The rest of the header measures the whole corpus, not the excerpt — the `ambiguous=` tally is the call-graph completeness gauge, and `amb="2"` on a row says two of that symbol's calls hit a name with several definitions and the resolver guessed. Read the source when which-target matters.
--test-gate — exit 4 while obligations remain, and why script_gates_unmodelled="332" stays nonzero on a clean clone **The test gate** — `--test-gate` names the obligations and exits 4 while any remain. Captured with an uncommitted change in the tree: `changed="1"` and the rows below appear only because something was actually pending. A clean clone exits 0 with every changed/impacted/test count at zero — except `script_gates_unmodelled=`, which is structural (it counts script-to-binary test runners the call graph cannot see, not git status) and stays nonzero even then: ``` $ ripwire . --test-gate # exit code: 4 … ``` A `run=` attribute appears only when a runner is derivable from real evidence — a test-dir script whose stem matches the harness, or whose text names it. No `run=` means *not derivable*, never a guessed suite command. `script_gates_unmodelled="332"` is the same discipline: script-to-binary is not a call edge, so those gates are invisible to this walk, and the number says so rather than letting `tests="2"` read as complete. The `` rows are the untested blast radius: impacted symbols that no test in the corpus reaches.
--from-trace — hand it the stack trace, sanitizer report or compiler error itself, not a paraphrase **From an error, not a paraphrase of one** — `--from-trace` takes a stack trace, sanitizer report or compiler error on stdin or from a file, maps its frames onto indexed symbols innermost-first, and returns the innermost in-corpus body with them: ```bash ./build/ripwire . --from-trace=asan_report.txt cmake --build build 2>&1 | ./build/ripwire . --from-trace=- ```
--- ## What's new
New (2026-08-30) — each measured, dated, and re-derivable; the losses and caveats stated in place - **`--slice-flow=back|fwd|both` — cross-statement data-flow slicing (ARISE rung 2, arXiv:2605.03117).** A bounded BFS from one variable over line-granular reaching-definition edges — backward to the statements whose values feed it, forward to the statements its value reaches — that **stops at function boundaries**, exactly as the paper's own slicer does. `--slice-depth=1..32` bounds it (default 8, always disclosed as `depth=`); a bound that cuts a row says `flow_truncated="1"`; without the new flags the v1 output is byte-identical. Measured on the registered fix-commit protocol over this repository's own history (**7 commits / 38 instances, cpp only — a thin corpus, reported as thin**): flow rows lift function-level added-line recall **0.163 → 0.198**, at a mean 4,993 output bytes — **25% of the 20,034-byte `--expand` whole-body baseline** whose recall is 1.0 by construction. (`bench/slice/run_slicerecall.py`; protocol, per-instance ledger and caveats in [`docs/EVALS.md`](docs/EVALS.md).) - **The `--slice` v1 contract got its first measured numbers** (registered 2026-08-28, no numbers until now): per-variable line-recall **0.726**, hit-all rate 0.632, over-inclusion 3.77×. The misses were inspected one by one and are dominated by the measurement's own relevance oracle — a word-regex that matches short identifiers inside comments and string literals, occurrences the slicer correctly refuses to call variable uses — so 0.726 is a **floor under a noisy oracle**; no inspected instance showed a real occurrence the slice dropped. - **`--expand` no longer hangs on minified bundles: the secret-redaction sweep was quadratic in LINE length.** Invisible on ~100-byte source lines, fatal on a 2.9 KB-average-line minified bundle: one selector in babel's 2.1 MB / 768-line yarn bundle **never completed** (killed at 1,343.9 s of user CPU with an empty output file; 196.7 s is the only clean lower bound) and now answers in **0.46 s warm**; the self-contained 20 KB single-line fixture went **23.02 s → 0.017 s (~1350×)**. A pure memoization, so an output no-op — **120/120 invocations byte-identical** across 24 corpora × 5 verb shapes — gated on behaviour only (`test/redactfixcheck.sh`), with the timings a ledger row in [`bench/PROFILE.md`](bench/PROFILE.md), never a red-CI threshold.
New (2026-08-23) — each measured on this tree's binary, with the command that re-derives it - **`--pattern` — structural search written in CODE, not in node kinds.** `--pattern='foo($X, ...)'` where `$NAME` binds one node, `$_` binds nothing and `...` is an ellipsis over siblings; comments are transparent, everything else is kind- and text-exact. Served across **13 grammar objects (11 languages)**, and it *refuses* rather than lying: a pattern no served grammar resolves, or that collapses to a bare token, exits 1 naming the served and unserved families — never `hits=0`. (`./build/ripwire . --pattern='VERIFY($X)'` on this repo: **101 hits over 625 eligible files**, each row carrying its enclosing symbol; `--pattern='$X'` exits **1** with the refusal text.) - **`--safe-delete=SYM` — "can I delete this?" in ONE call.** Composes the signals the tool already computes for a resolved symbol: 1-hop callers, the transitive blast radius, every read/write/ import/call site, how much of that radius any test reaches, and `--dead-code`'s own shape — then reports `risk=` as a **fact**, never a go/no-go verdict. (`--safe-delete=coversOrEquals`: `callers="2" impact_reaches="17" uses="2" radius_tested="0" radius_untested="17" dead_code_candidate="0" risk="untested-radius"`.) - **`--impact` grew a disclosed import tier.** A class whose consumers `#include` or `require` the file that defines it used to look like it had no blast radius at all. `importers=` is now a second, weaker reach beside `reaches=` — with its own cap pair and `` rows, and **never summed into `reaches=`**, because files and symbols are different units. (`--impact=IngestResult` on this repo: `reaches="0" importers="70" shown_importers="40" importers_capped="1"` — a symbol that reads as unreachable by calls and is included by 70 files.) - **Conceptual `--for` queries serve a compact map instead of inline bodies.** Bodies were **52.7% of every conceptual-query byte** — the one class that missed the byte target — so the subtoken+body route now ships the ranked map plus one-hop `` edge context and no body CDATA, disclosed on the root as `bundle="compact" bodies="0" reason="compact-route"`. Across the frozen 15-query class-B set that is **184,857 B → 95,256 B, −48.5%**, with all 11 judged-decisive markers still present (better than either pre-existing lever's 10/11). `--auto-bodies` is a permanent opt-out, not a migration aid. (One pair on this repo, re-derived 2026-08-23: `--for="incremental cache invalidation"` **8,487 B** compact vs **12,044 B** with `--auto-bodies`, **−29.5%**; the 15-query total is [`docs/EVALS.md` §5](docs/EVALS.md).) - **`--pack-task` orders callers by corroboration.** A neighbour reached by several of the bundle's top anchors is more likely to be the thing you must touch than one reached by exactly one, so rows sort by `shared=` — the count of top-K anchors that reach them — omitted at 1 because that is what every 1-hop row satisfies by construction. (`--pack-task="emit the minified xml map"` puts `escapeXml` first at `shared="4"`.) - **`--lint` rolls up per rule, so a capped view stops hiding whole rules.** Every rule gets a `` row, and a rule whose registered languages match nothing in the corpus carries `applicable="0"` so its zero reads as structural inertness rather than a measurement. On this repository the default view shows 692 of 3,332 findings — and **14 of the 31 rules that fired contribute zero shown rows**, 368 findings whose only evidence is their `count=`. (`./build/ripwire . --lint`, counted from the `` rows.) - **PHP and Lua joined the language line**, with their floors stated rather than implied: PHP's dynamic dispatch (`$fn()`, `call_user_func`, `__call`) names its callee at run time and is a declared floor; a Lua corpus reports no inheritance edges, because metatable inheritance is a runtime call with no syntax to read.
Earlier — New (2026-08-15), kept with its own dates rather than overwritten - **`--expand` answers "show me this function" in one call, −47.3% tokens** — an exact-name ask now skips the ranked-map preamble by default and the body arrives with its file's sibling symbols and imports inline (`sibs=`/`inc=`), so the follow-up "what else is in this file?" call never happens. (Re-derived 2026-08-15 fix-expand round: `--expand=emitGrepReport` — 47,252 B classic 200-row-map bundle vs 24,911 B today's exact-name default, on this repo; the figure moves as the corpus grows and is not itself CI-gated, so re-measure before citing it in a future round.) - **`--grep` groups, deduplicates, and speaks boolean** — per-file grouping, identical-line collapse ("this exact guard appears at 6 call sites" is the finding), and `--and=`/`--not=`/`--grep-scope=`: a two-term ask returns the *complete* answer at **−78%** of the single-term dump. Default view now runs at ~clean-grep cost while naming the enclosing symbol for every hit. - **C++ maps got materially truer**: out-of-line definitions past one qualifier (`Outer::Inner::method(){}` — the house style of large C++ codebases) were silently invisible; on one 6,600-file production tree that was ~15% of qualified definitions. Now indexed at any depth. - **Compound `--graph-query` filters run ~25× faster** via predicate pushdown — an exact algebraic identity, byte-identical output, gate-enforced.
## Measured
Read this first if you are here to check whether the tool is oversold — every number with its instrument and corpus, plus the claims this project deliberately does not publish Every published number lives in **[`docs/EVALS.md`](docs/EVALS.md)** with the instrument that produced it, the corpus it ran on, and the in-tree file that pins it — alongside a counterexample section and a list of the claims this project deliberately does *not* publish. Read those first if you are here to check whether the tool is oversold.
### Against other tools
Round 4: 58.3% against 40.0% — a 1.46× margin at a 0.31 s index; N = 60 paired, zero exclusions, all arms re-run 2026-08-08 **Round 4 (re-run in full 2026-08-08): 58.3% strict file@10 against 40.0% for the best competitor — a 1.46× margin, at a 0.31 s index.** N = 60 paired instances, zero exclusions, one binary (the profile-guided release build that now ships), one evaluator, all arms re-run on the same day. *Strict file@10 = all gold files inside the top 10.*
| Arm | strict file@10 | any@10 | index (median) | query (median) | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | **ripwire `--for`** | **58.3%** | **85.0%** | **0.31 s** | 0.108 s | | codebase-memory-mcp 0.9.0 | 40.0% | 63.3% | 1.24 s | 0.075 s | | repowise 0.37.0 (MCP `search_codebase`, LLM-free wiki) | 33.3% | 53.3% | 34.0 s¹ | 1.159 s¹ | | graphify 0.9.34 (`--code-only --no-cluster`, keyless) | 31.7% | 46.7% | 7.82 s | 0.614 s | | Aider repo-map 0.86.2 (ident-personalized) | 20.0% | 35.0% | *(inside query)* | 2.920 s | | Aider repo-map 0.86.2 (no-personalization control) | 10.0% | 25.0% | *(inside query)* | 0.818 s | | codeseek 0.1.31 (ident-mention convention arm) | 15.0% | 20.0% | 3.37 s | 0.040 s | | codeseek 0.1.31 (raw issue text, keyless fallback) | 0.0%² | 0.0% | 3.37 s | 0.024 s |
Round-4 method and the paired losses — one binary, one evaluator, what re-running cost us, and the three limits that travel with this table **Round 4 (first run 2026-08-06; re-run in full 2026-08-08 on the profile-guided release build) — N = 60 paired instances, zero exclusions, one binary, one evaluator.** Every competitor was re-run on the same day against the same ripwire binary and the same evaluator, so the arms are directly comparable to each other. Earlier rounds could not say that: r1 (2026-07-13/14) and r2 (2026-08-03) each scored a different subset against a different binary, which is why this page used to print two tables and ask the reader not to compare them. *Strict file@10 = **all** gold files inside the top 10.* Harness, per-instance JSONL, and a reproduction recipe: [`bench/headtohead/r4-2026-08-06/`](bench/headtohead/r4-2026-08-06/). Paired, ripwire's losses are **2** instances to codebase-memory-mcp, **2** to repowise, **1** each to graphify and aider; codeseek never beat it. **Cold from nothing to an answer** — parse, rank, reply, no cache — ripwire takes **0.213 s**, against a ~34 s index-then-query for repowise, whose worst single index in this run was **352 s**. That comparison is only possible because ripwire's own index was measured this round; r2 recorded competitor index walls and deliberately refused to tabulate them, since a one-sided cost table is not evidence. **What re-running cost us, stated because it is the reason to re-run at all.** **codebase-memory-mcp is the true runner-up at 40.0%** — r1 credited it with 26.7%, and scoring it fairly against today's binary raised it. graphify rose 21.7% → 31.7% and aider 13.3% → 20.0% the same way. The margin over the best competitor is therefore **1.46×**, not the 1.75× that two separately-dated tables implied; the old framing flattered us by comparing today's ripwire against year-old competitor runs. Three limits travel with this table. ¹ repowise's walls include a fresh MCP-server spawn per query; resident-server usage is faster. ² codeseek's raw row returned **0 results on 60/60 queries** — its keyless fallback matches function names only, so that row measures a query-protocol boundary, not its embedder-backed shipping mode (unbenchmarked here). And the slice is **Python-dominant** — 107 of 134 gold files are `.py` — so this measures Python localization, not every [supported language](#languages). **Vexp and CodeIndexer were excluded, not beaten**: their free tiers (node/project/chunk caps) cannot run a fair 60-instance sweep. An independent adversarial pass attacked the r2 comparison's design, and its findings and dispositions ship with that report ([`VERIFIER.md`](bench/headtohead/r2-2026-08-03/VERIFIER.md)); r1's and r2's tables remain in their own directories as the historical record.
The open problem — multi-file gold: 21.4% strict against 78.6% any@10, and four pre-registered fixes rejected at ±0.00pp **Multi-file gold is hard for every arm, including ours, and four attempts have failed to fix it.** ripwire leads the stratum at 21.4% strict — but its own any@10 there is 78.6%: it finds *a* gold file and misses the siblings. If each gold file were an independent draw at the single-file rate (90.6%), multi-file would score 71.2%; it scores 21.4%, so the failures are strongly correlated. The mechanism is that a sibling is a file which changed *because* the primary changed — the primary carries the issue's vocabulary, the siblings carry the consequences. Four pre-registered rounds (`r1_anchorhop`, `r1cpp_anchorhop`, `r4_siblift`, `r5_pooling`) have now been rejected at ±0.00pp against it, each archived with its grid and its verdict under [`bench/locbench/results/`](bench/locbench/results/).
Round 3 (2026-08-03) — headroom, the compression-layer competitor: 0 tokens saved on ripwire's output, and 5/12 losses published first **Round three (2026-08-03): headroom — the compression-layer competitor.** headroom (`headroom-ai==0.33.0`, 64k★) compresses context an agent already fetched; it retrieves nothing — so this round's instrument is **tokens-to-correct-answer** on 12 pre-registered mid-task questions (django @ pinned commit, five arms, one tokenizer), not file@k. **ripwire won every measure the two tools share.** headroom's default config passed every code chunk through **byte-identical** — its own protective guards fired throughout, netting −410 tokens on a 685,682-token workload (its own limitations page says "Code — Passthrough"; this run confirms it live) — and stacking it on ripwire's output added **exactly 0 tokens** of savings: the map is already past the density compression targets. As measured then, ripwire answered at **7.3%** of the naive grep-and-read baseline's tokens (**1.7%** on the subset both arms fully answered), warm in ~0.14 s per verb. Those two figures were re-derived on 2026-08-23 and now read **5.0%** and **5.2%** — the block below. **The losses in this round are ripwire's own, and they are published first**: under the frozen no-human verb ladders it strictly satisfied only **5/12** questions vs the naive baseline's 11/12 — four ranking defects, one missing symbol kind, two harness artifacts, each bucketed with its fix disposition in the report. What the round does **not** show: headroom's home turf (JSON/log tool-output compression, provider-cache economics) was deliberately not measured — ripwire does not compete there. Provenance: [`docs/EVALS.md` §2](docs/EVALS.md), full record + adversarial verification (which materially corrected the draft's arithmetic in headroom's favor) in [`bench/headtohead/r3-headroom-2026-08-03/`](bench/headtohead/r3-headroom-2026-08-03/).
Round 3, re-derived 2026-08-23 — one headline improved, the other got worse, and both are printed The 2026-08-03 round is frozen; this is the same instrument pointed at today's binary. Arms **A** (idealized grep-and-read) and **C** (ripwire's pre-registered verb ladders) were re-run from the committed `harness.py`, importing its metric functions unmodified — same `questions.json`, same frozen `arms_spec.json` ladders, same `tiktoken cl100k_base` counter, same corpus pin (`django/django @ 70f39e46`). The headroom arms (B/B′/D) were not re-run; they contribute nothing to the ripwire-vs-naive ratio, and the round's finding about them is a passthrough result that does not depend on ripwire's side. **The naive arm reproduced exactly** — all 12 questions token-for-token, 685,682 t in total — which is what makes the comparison a measurement of ripwire's change and not of drift somewhere else. Satisfaction did not move either: **5/12** for ripwire, **11/12** for naive, and the both-satisfied set is the identical `{q02, q03, q04, q05, q11}`. | | 2026-08-03 | 2026-08-23 | | | --- | ---: | ---: | --- | | naive (arm A) total | 685,682 t | 685,682 t | reproduced to the token | | ripwire (arm C) total | 50,138 t | **33,948 t** | −32.3% | | **overall ripwire ÷ naive** | **7.3%** | **5.0%** | **better** | | both-satisfied, naive | 219,223 t | 219,223 t | same 5 questions | | both-satisfied, ripwire | 3,775 t | **11,471 t** | +204% | | **both-satisfied ripwire ÷ naive** | **1.7% (58×)** | **5.2% (19×)** | **worse** | | ripwire tokens spent on its own misses | 92.5% | 66.2% | | **Why they moved apart.** The compact conceptual route made the seven questions ripwire *misses* dramatically cheaper — `q07` 13,198 → 4,416 t, `q08` 11,192 → 2,016 t, `q01` 11,974 → 3,045 t — which is what pulls the overall share down. On the five it *answers*, richer default bundles cost more: `q05` 522 → 6,736 t and `q11` 280 → 1,373 t dominate that column. The 58× figure was always the flattering framing of a 5-of-12 result, and the honest reading of the pair is that ripwire got much better at being wrong cheaply and somewhat more expensive at being right. Nothing about the four ranking defects, the missing symbol kind or the two harness artifacts in the original loss buckets has been re-adjudicated here — the satisfaction column is unchanged, so those losses stand.
LocBench held-out, N = 243 across 78 repositories — strict file@10 60.9% against 27.6% pre-routing, a paired +33.33pp, bought for −39.4% on the token ceiling **LocBench held-out, N = 243 across 78 repositories.** Strict file@10 **60.9%**, against **27.6%** for the pre-routing baseline — a paired **+33.33pp** with a clustered-bootstrap 95% lower bound of **+25.00pp**, bought for +3.4% warm latency and **−39.4%** on the production token ceiling. More accurate *and* cheaper, which is why it shipped.
### What it saves you, in tokens Context is the budget an agent actually spends. Three measurements, each with the instrument that pins it: | Where the saving comes from | Measured | Pinned by | | --- | --- | --- | | `--pack-signatures` — body-elided declaration skeletons instead of full bodies | **80.2% fewer element bytes** at top-50 (84.5% at top-10, 80.6% at top-100) — re-derived 2026-08-30 | `test/showcasecapturecheck.sh`, re-derived from this repo every run | | Query-shape routing, on the production token ceiling | **−39.4%** p50, while strict file@10 rose +33.33pp | `bench/locbench/`, [EVALS §3](docs/EVALS.md) | | A whole-question bundle against a naive agent read | **96.0% fewer tokens (24.9×)** — 14,758 against 367,192, tiktoken `cl100k_base`, six realistic questions | `bench/BENCHMARK.md` — *historical, private corpus, not reproducible from this tree* |
Read this before quoting those numbers — root-neutralised bytes, the private-corpus caveat, and the two verbs where the saving inverts Read the first row's methodology before quoting it: element bytes are counted **root-neutralised**, with the corpus-root prefix subtracted from both sides, because the root repeats inside every element, is charged in both forms, and is not what this verb elides. Quote the top-50 figure — the signature payload is top-50 whatever `--top-k` says, and top-10 is a ten-symbol sample that one one-line accessor can move several points. The gate fails if the documentation drifts more than 1.5 points from the binary. And the third row's caveat is not small: it was measured 2026-06-20 on a large private C++ corpus, it is not publicly reproducible from this tree, and it proves *cheaper and faster*, not *better outcomes*. **The losses ship next to the wins.** `--grep`'s 2026-06 anti-headline (+19.7% / −11.2% vs raw grep) was re-derived 2026-08-15 after the emission overhaul: the **un-tiered view** — `--grep-in=any`, which was the default when this was measured — lands at **−1.9% / +4.3%** of a clean grep dump while carrying enclosing symbols and in-band honesty grep cannot give — one term either side of parity, which is not a headline in either direction — but an uncapped dump of that same un-tiered view remains token-negative (**+150% / +214%**), and this project still says so. (Span tiers landed 2026-08-19 and made the *default* a filtered view of the same scan; every byte number on this page is the un-tiered one, deliberately — the instrument may not move under a display change — so none of them describes today's default. See `docs/EVALS.md` §grep.) Nor is that the worst regime: on *small-hit uncapped* answers the fixed per-answer legend is not amortized over anything, and a gated set of twelve such queries on this repository runs **+65.1% median, larger than plain grep on 12 of 12**. When the agent knows a second term, `--grep=A --and=B` flips hard positive (**−77.7%** measured, complete both sides). `--pack-signatures` inverts on a short symbol: 303 bytes of signature-plus-doc-comment against a 158-byte body. The headline is a property of large result sets, and [the full counterexample list](#in-the-numbers) is part of the contract, not an appendix — the four-fact grep re-derivation lives in [`docs/EVALS.md` §5](docs/EVALS.md).
--- ### Where its own cycles go — hardware counters, per scope
3.2–3.5 instructions per cycle across parse and query, and the ≈167× fewer instructions a warm run retires **Every pipeline phase is bracketed by two hardware-counter reads, and the numbers say what wall-clock cannot.** Parse and query retire **3.2–3.5 instructions per cycle**; the graph phases stream at 32–35 L1D MPKI and still hold IPC above 3.1 (guardrail G2 doing its visible job); and a warm run replaces the dominant phase's 8.74 B instructions with a 52.3 M-instruction cache load, **≈167× fewer**. Two opt-in builds go faster still — PGO by **14–25% cold** — with **byte-identical** output on every one.
How the self-profiler measures — kperf / perf_event_open, the per-scope counter table, and the three things it says that wall-clock cannot The self-profiler (`-DRIPWIRE_PROFILE=ON`; `src/infra/profileScope.h` + `profilePmc.h`) brackets every pipeline phase with two hardware-counter reads — kperf on Apple Silicon, a pinned `perf_event_open` group on Linux. Below: ripwire mapping **its own public tree** on an Apple M5 Pro, cold (`--no-cache`) except the last row. Counters are raw integers, never scaled; reproduce steps in [`bench/PROFILE.md`](bench/PROFILE.md) (arming needs root; unprivileged runs print the same table with timing columns only — the honest degrade). The report renders on **stderr**; stdout stays the deterministic XML map, so redirects and `| xmllint` pipes behave the same in the profile flavour. | scope | calls | instructions | IPC | L1D MPKI | wall | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | tree-sitter parse | 803 | 8.74 B | 3.52 | 4.0 | 731 ms | | tags query exec + captures | 803 | 8.65 B | 3.22 | 3.0 | 635 ms | | resolve refs + build CSR | 1 | 54.6 M | 3.27 | 35.4 | 3.6 ms | | PageRank (power iteration) | 1 | 13.7 M | 3.17 | 32.4 | 0.93 ms | | serialize ranked map | 1 | 3.24 M | 2.43 | 6.1 | 0.29 ms | | **warm run** — loadCache (read + deserialize) | 1 | 52.3 M | 3.18 | 7.5 | 3.6 ms | Three things the counters say that wall-clock alone cannot. The parse/query phases are compute-dense, not stall-bound: 3.2–3.5 instructions retired per cycle at ~3–4 L1D misses per thousand. The graph phases stream hard — 32–35 L1D MPKI — yet hold IPC above 3.1, which is the DOD/SoA/CSR layout (G2) doing its visible job. And the auto-cache's whole story in two rows: a warm run replaces the dominant phase's 8.74 B instructions with a 52.3 M-instruction cache load, ≈167× fewer instructions. Caveats travel with the table: counters are per-thread and aggregated per scope, so rows must not be summed across scopes (a recursive site samples only its outermost frame); one machine, one corpus — re-run on yours. Backend contract is gated by [`test/pmccheck.sh`](test/pmccheck.sh); M5 Pro event names verified (the last-level alias resolves via `PL2_CACHE_MISS_LD`).
The two opt-in faster builds — LTO on by default, PGO at 14–25% cold, and why the output stays byte-identical **Every number on this page is the DEFAULT build — and there is a faster one you can opt into.** A clang optimization-remarks pass over `src/` (`-DRIPWIRE_OPT_REMARKS=ON`; the whole triage is in [`docs/OPTREMARKS.md`](docs/OPTREMARKS.md)) found that the phases above spend their time calling tree-sitter's C API across a translation-unit boundary — 397 of 636 distinct `inline/NoDefinition` remarks in the hot TU name a `ts_*` accessor. Two build options answer that, both **off by default**: | build | cold | warm | | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | `-DRIPWIRE_LTO=OFF` | baseline | baseline | the fast edit loop, not the fast binary | | **default** (`cmake -S . -B build`, LTO on) | 1–6% faster | 0–3% faster | | | `scripts/pgobuild.sh` (PGO on top of LTO) | **14–25% faster** (6–16% over the default) | 5–10% faster | the fastest binary this tree can produce | Measured by interleaved A/B (`A,B,A,B,…`, median **and** min, 9–31 runs per arm, repeated) on this repository *and* on a ~2000-file C++ tree that appears in no training run — the held-out corpus shows the same or larger gain, which is what rules out training on the benchmark. **Output is byte-identical** on all three builds and on both corpora, and the determinism gate passes on every tree; these options change how fast the answer arrives, never what it is. Cold gains 2–3× more than warm because cold is a branchy walk over tree-sitter's parse tree, while warm already runs in the cache-tuned CSR/SoA/B+tree structures G2 exists to produce. **LTO is on by default** — it costs link time and nothing else, and link time is not what this tool is optimized for. PGO needs a training run, so it stays a driven build (`scripts/pgobuild.sh`) rather than something a bare `cmake --build` does behind your back.
On a vPMU-less cloud VM the columns don't vanish — software counters, a G2 witness at zero page faults, and the 2.17 s subprocess they exposed **And on machines with no PMU at all — most cloud VMs and CI boxes — the counter columns no longer vanish.** A kernel that refuses every hardware event (`ENOENT`; no vPMU is the common cloud case) still offers software counters, so the Linux backend's per-event graceful skip now extends to the group leader and falls through to two `PERF_TYPE_SOFTWARE` rows — `task-clock` (on-CPU ns) and `page-faults` — under their own column names, never as a stand-in for the hardware counts. Below, ripwire mapping its own tree, cold, on the 2-vCPU vPMU-less Intel Xeon VM this was validated live on: | scope | calls | wall | task-clock (on-CPU) | page-faults | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | tree-sitter parse | 799 | 1,773 ms | 1,134 ms | 6.4 k | | tags query exec + captures | 799 | 1,084 ms | 1,071 ms | 6.7 k | | doc post-pass (main-thread wait on the pool) | 1 | 2,174 ms | 0.50 ms | 0 | | resolve refs + build CSR | 1 | 12.32 ms | 12.31 ms | 7 | Four things this buys that wall-clock alone cannot say. The wall−task-clock gap is *off-CPU time*: the parse phase's 36% gap is 2-vCPU oversubscription made visible (a pool parsing 799 files on two cores). The CSR row is a live cross-check: `task-clock` is the kernel's clock, the wall column is the profiler's own — two independent clocks agreeing to 0.05% on a single-threaded scope. (Short hot scopes diverge by the documented read-bracket overhead instead: the counter bracket encloses the tick bracket.) The `page-faults` column is a **G2 witness**: PageRank's power iteration retires with **zero** page faults and the CSR build with **7**, against ~3,100 in the allocation-heavy model-build scopes — the no-allocation rule inside the ranked loop, watchable on a box with no PMU. And the doc post-pass row caught something real: 2.17 s of wall on **0.5 ms** of CPU is work happening *outside the process* — with `markitdown` installed, the showcase PDF and PPTX are re-extracted by subprocess on **every** run, cache or no cache, which on this box is ~97% of a warm run's wall (2.05 s of 2.11 s); child CPU is invisible to every per-thread counter, and the wall-vs-task-clock gap is precisely the signature that flags it. (The extraction is already documented in-tree as a pure function of the file bytes — a cache candidate, now measured.) Only a kernel that offers nothing at all — `perf_event_paranoid>=3`, seccomp — still degrades to timing-only, and `pmccheck`'s inactive arm now proves that was truly the case.
## Standing on the whole field
42 repositories, 67 papers and a 237-tool survey — and the study where search over a pre-built index beats a delegating planner 65.2% to 46.2%, at under half the cost Almost none of the ideas here are new; the combination and the constraints are. Lessons folded from **42 repositories and 67 papers** into one deterministic executable, alongside a labelled survey of 237 tools that folded nothing and are catalogued separately — the two sets are disjoint, so they add rather than nest. The row-by-row ledger, each with the lesson taken and where it lives, is [`docs/LINEAGE.md`](docs/LINEAGE.md). Those three counts are derived from that document's own tables by `test/readmedriftcheck.sh`, which fails if this sentence and those tables disagree. One of those papers measures the alternative architecture directly: an independent study found a planner that delegates exploration to a sub-agent in an isolated context window losing to search over a pre-built index — 65.2% vs 46.2% accuracy, at less than half the cost — with 41.8% of the delegated arm's failures happening silently at the planner→sub-agent hand-off ([arXiv:2608.01507](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01507)). A single process answering in one call has no hand-off to fail at.
--- ## The honesty contract The differentiator is not a number, it is a discipline: **a measurement you cannot check is a claim, and this tool ships the check.** ### What it misses, and what to run next
What a name-based call graph cannot see — dynamic dispatch, a callback routed through a table, a symbol that exists only after macro expansion A name-based call graph cannot see dynamic dispatch, a callback routed through a table, or a symbol that exists only after macro expansion. Every static tool has that horizon; the one that costs you a bug is the one that hides it. So the contract is not *it sees everything* — it is **nothing it is unsure about reaches your agent unlabelled.**
Measured against a compiler-grade oracle, its silent-miss count is zero — of 68 answers six were imperfect and four flagged themselves; no imperfect answer arrived unmarked **Measured against a compiler-grade oracle, its silent-miss count is zero.** Of 68 answers scored against a `scip-clang` index, six were imperfect and four flagged themselves; the other two were right, and the oracle was the one that could not see the files. No imperfect answer arrived unmarked.
Three ways to escalate on purpose — --expand for the body, --uses/--impact for the blast radius, --scip for compiler-grade edges When a mark says the cheap answer is not enough, escalate on purpose — never by guessing: 1. **`--expand=SYM`** — read the body it ranked, still a fraction of a whole-file read. 2. **`--uses=SYM` / `--impact=SYM`** — every read, write and import site, and the transitive blast radius. `--callers` alone under-counts, and says so. 3. **`--scip=index.scip`** — hand it a compiler-grade index and precise edges *replace* the name-based guesses, tagged `prov="scip"`. Missing or corrupt index degrades; it never fails.
The six marks the output uses — amb=, ambiguous=, counts_floor=, unresolved=, external=, --skipped The map for this repository's own `src/` grades itself in the header before a single answer (2026-08-10, at `4e245d7`): `files=109 symbols=3233 edges=10132 ambiguous=4768 unresolved=1097`. **Read `ambiguous=` as a property of the indexed tree, not a score for the resolver.** It counts call names that hit more than one definition, so it moves when the *corpus* gains same-named symbols — and it just did, visibly. On 2026-08-09 this number rose from 2991 to 4507. The cause was attributed by swapping one file back and re-measuring: `src/infra/svector.h` alone accounts for 4507 → 2741. The small-vector there grew a full container interface, so the tree now defines its own `size`, `begin`, `end`, `push_back` and `data` — the most-called names in any C++ corpus. Adding a container is a name collision by construction. Expect the number to climb again as that container replaces `std::vector` across the tree; a rise there means the map is disclosing more overloading, not resolving worse. | the output says | read it as | | --- | --- | | `amb="K"` | K of this symbol's calls hit an overloaded name — one target was chosen; read the source if which one matters | | `ambiguous=N` | the map's completeness gauge, one number, in the header | | `counts_floor="1"` | a floor, not a total — a zero means *none found*, never *none exists* | | `unresolved=N` | call sites recognized and deliberately not resolved — counted, never dropped in silence | | `external="1"` | no definition anywhere in the indexed tree — stdlib or third-party, not a miss | | `--skipped` | every file the index does not contain, itemized with its reason — `oversize`, `excluded`, `unsupported-ext`, a pruned vendor tree (`pruned_dirs=`, contents unknown, not zero) — plus the files it DOES contain but cannot vouch for: `degraded-parse` (tree-sitter error spans, with `err_ratio=`) and `minified-suspect` (`ws_freq=`) |
How the zero was measured — the sweep, the two unflagged answers, and the 22.6% it over-hedges A 34-query sweep of this repository, 68 answers across `--uses` and `--callers`, scored against a `scip-clang` index (2026-08-09, the shipping binary). Six answers were imperfect; four carried a discriminating self-flag (`amb=`, `defs>1`, `external="1"`). The two unflagged were **not misses**: the oracle could not see those files — a Python file under `bench/`, an uncompiled file under `test/` — and ripwire's answer was the correct one. It errs the other way instead. **14 of 62 correct answers carried a caution flag they did not need — 22.6% over-hedging**, up from 18.6% before this round's resolver fixes, because closing loss buckets added marks faster than it removed them. That bias is deliberate: a flag you did not need costs you one source read; a miss you were never told about costs you a bug. One corpus, 34 queries, and the oracle has blind spots of its own — the limits that travel with the number are listed with it. Receipt, per-query scores and reproduction: [`bench/headtohead/r9-2026-08-09/`](bench/headtohead/r9-2026-08-09/).
### In the output
Three rules the output enforces on itself — a zero reads as none found never none exists; every truncation says what it withheld; every count names its unit **Three rules the output enforces on itself:** a zero reads as *none found*, never *none exists*; every truncation says what it withheld and how to page it; and every count names its unit, because the units differ by verb.
The three rules in full — counts_floor="1", the shown_*/*_capped= paging vocabulary, and why two counts can disagree honestly - **A zero is a measurement, not an absence.** `counts_floor="1"` marks every count that name-based resolution cannot prove is a total. Read a zero as *none found*, never *none exists*. - **Truncation is disclosed where it happens.** `shown_*`, `*_capped=` and the paging attributes say what was withheld and how to page it; the legend comment that leads each document defines the vocabulary in full, so the output explains itself without this README. - **Units are named, because they differ by verb.** The callers count is distinct symbols, the impact count is a reach set, the uses count is call sites. The legend says which, so two numbers that look contradictory can be read as the different questions they answer.
### In the numbers
Four negatives published on purpose — including PageRank as a co-change ranker: 3.8% recall@5 against plain lexical's 40.3% The evaluation labels were authored by reading the source and deciding which symbol *is* the on-task answer — never by transcribing the ranker's own output — so the eval is allowed to say the ranker is wrong, and it has. These are the results that say so, all in-tree, all published on purpose: - **`--grep` costs more tokens than it saves**, and **`--pack-signatures` can make output bigger** — both quantified [next to the savings they qualify](#what-it-saves-you-in-tokens), because saying so is cheaper than being caught. - **The public C++ number is materially lower than the retired private one was.** SFML: strict file@10 28.7%, any@10 41.7%, first-hit MRR 0.21 — measured at commit `d411f3de4` (`bench/cppbench/results/sfml_scoreboard.md`). Until 2026-08-07 this bullet compared against a roughly-89%-any@10 private corpus that is no longer reproducible from this tree; that comparison is retired. The public number is the baseline going forward. - **PageRank is a bad co-change ranker** — 3.8% recall@5 against 40.3% for plain lexical, and fusing the two made it worse. Relatedness is lexical; importance is structural; the tool uses different machinery for each because the measurement said so. - **Strict multi-file localization is hard and stays hard.** Held-out LocBench: single-file gold 73.4%, multi-file 18.2%. Every corpus shows the same cliff.
### In the tests
558 gate scripts, five contracts no unit test can hold, and the house rule: write the gate before the code it measures `test/regression.sh` names **558 gate scripts** and is the authoritative list; `python3 test/pargates.py . ./build/ripwire -j 6` runs the same set in parallel. On top of them sit the contracts that do not fit a unit test: two runs byte-identical, warm output identical to cold, output that pipes clean through `xmllint --noout`, a sanitizer build with `-fno-sanitize-recover=all`, and a differential argv harness that runs a reference binary and the candidate over every argument vector and requires stdout, stderr and exit code to match on each. The house rule behind all of it: **write the gate before the code it measures.** A ranking, a token estimate and a call graph all look plausible whether or not they are correct.
--- ## Set it up in your coding agent
Why the CLI is primary and MCP is opt-in — the per-session context cost that decides it, and the edit verbs both surfaces expose **If your agent can run shell commands, it is already set up.** The CLI is the primary interface: `ripwire` on `PATH` costs the agent nothing until the moment it runs a command — no server to register, no tool schemas riding in every request's context. The one step that matters is installing the skills (step 2 below), which teach the agent *when* to reach for which verb. The MCP server is the **optional** second interface, for what a shell pipe can't give you: clients without shell access, lazy body *handles* (fetch a symbol's source only when actually needed), and the same span-addressed edit operations against an already-warm index. The CLI exposes those edits too, with the same staleness/ambiguity refusal and atomic-write contract: ```bash ripwire . --replace-symbol-body=SYM --edit-payload=definition.txt printf '%s' "$BLOCK" | ripwire . --insert-before-symbol=SYM --edit-payload=- ``` That MCP convenience has a cost the CLI doesn't carry — the verb schemas sit in the agent's context every session — so register it when you want those verbs, not as a default.
### 1. (Optional) Register the MCP server `ripwire wrap ` prints the recipe for the agent you name. It **prints**; it never edits your config — you read the line, then run it. ```bash ripwire wrap claude # MCP: claude mcp add ripwire -- ripwire --mcp ripwire wrap cursor # MCP: the mcpServers stanza for .cursor/mcp.json (or ~/.cursor/mcp.json) ripwire wrap codex # CLI-first: optional MCP restricted to audit/health verbs in Codex TOML ripwire wrap windsurf # MCP: that client's stanza ripwire wrap gemini # MCP: that client's stanza ripwire wrap opencode # CLI-1st: the AGENTS.md wiring; its "mcp" stanza offered as the alternative ripwire wrap aider # no MCP: a ranked map file, and the aider invocation that reads it ripwire wrap --all # detect every installed agent and emit each one's config ```
One stdio server, 31 verbs — 16 read, 12 flagship-reflex, 3 span-addressed edit **One stdio server, 31 verbs** — 16 read, 12 flagship-reflex, 3 span-addressed edit — and a client that isn't one of the six above can be pointed at the same process by hand.
What the 31 verbs are — lazy body handles, the edit verbs' safety contract, the pre-print skill scan, and the hand-written stanza for any other MCP client That registers one stdio server — `ripwire --mcp` — exposing **31 verbs**: 16 read verbs, 12 flagship-reflex verbs, and 3 span-addressed edit verbs. Read verbs mirror the CLI (`analyze`, `for`, `grep`, `cochange`, `fetch_body`, `lego`, `mentions`, `owners`, `memory_recall`, `situational_awareness`, `batch`, …); `find_symbol` and `find_referencing_symbols` attach a stable `handle` instead of a body, so the agent fetches source only when it actually needs it. The edit verbs mirror the CLI flags and enforce the shared safety contract — staleness refusal, ambiguity refusal, mode preservation and atomic writes. Full reference: [`skills/ripwire-mcp/`](skills/ripwire-mcp/). Before printing, `wrap` security-scans `./skills` and `.agents/skills` with the same engine as `--scan-skills`: a CRITICAL finding blocks the recipe, warnings print and continue. **If your client is not one of the six**, the server is a plain stdio MCP process and every client that speaks MCP can be pointed at it by hand. The whole configuration is: ```json { "mcpServers": { "ripwire": { "command": "ripwire", "args": ["--mcp"] } } } ``` Use an absolute path in `command` if `ripwire` is not on the agent's `PATH`. For a client that wants a socket instead of stdio, `ripwire --listen=HOST:PORT` serves the same verbs.
### 2. Install the skills
Eighteen task-shaped skills, every install mode, and the --scan-skills verdict to read first `skills/` ships **eighteen task-shaped skills** that tell an agent *which* verb answers the moment it is in — orienting cold, tracing a call, sizing a refactor, checking a diff, hunting a bug, writing tests, reviewing security. Without them an agent has 31 verbs and no map of when each applies; the skills name the moment each verb is for. Install as symlinks back into this repo, so edits here take effect immediately: ```bash skills/install.sh # → ~/.claude/skills skills/install.sh --codex # → ${AGENTS_HOME:-~/.agents}/skills (canonical Codex/agent path) skills/install.sh --codex --hook # → also install Codex's task router, CLI nudge + session primer skills/install.sh --codex-legacy # → ${CODEX_HOME:-~/.codex}/skills (older Codex installs) skills/install.sh /some/path # → an explicit destination skills/install.sh --contributor # → also the contributor-facing skill (compiling ripwire itself) ripwire --scan-skills=skills # read the security scanner's verdict first, if you would rather ``` The script's own header documents its other modes, including the opt-in advisory PreToolUse hook. `wrap` also prints a pasteable use-when blurb for your client's rules file (`CLAUDE.md`, `AGENTS.md`, `.cursor/rules`, …) and works from a prebuilt install with no checkout — from v0.2.2 it points at the installer's staged copy of the skills when the cwd is not a checkout.
--- ## Improve it with your agent [`prompts/`](prompts/) holds twelve **self-contained orchestrator prompts**: the loops this project is built with, written so a coding agent can run them. They encode the workflow rather than describing it.
How to run one — build first, paste the file, and it writes a plan and stops for your go-ahead before anything runs How to run one: 1. Build the tool first — most loops need a binary to measure against: `cmake -S . -B build && cmake --build build -j` 2. Open your coding agent at the root of a ripwire checkout. 3. Paste the contents of one prompt file. It needs nothing else from that directory. 4. **It writes a plan and stops for your go-ahead.** Nothing runs before you approve it — read the plan, cut what you disagree with, then say go. 5. The loop runs its own gates in the foreground and reports what it left green.
Three worth starting with: | Prompt | What it produces | | --- | --- | | [`full-audit.md`](prompts/full-audit.md) | A severity-ranked audit across bugs, measured performance, verb-to-moment matching, token efficiency, and an ecosystem scan of papers and repos with real momentum. | | [`dogfood-gaps.md`](prompts/dogfood-gaps.md) | A real task done using only ripwire for navigation, with every fallback to grep or a whole-file read logged as a product gap at the moment it happened. | | [`capture-audit.md`](prompts/capture-audit.md) | A fresh showcase capture read by parallel adversarial lenses, and the findings turned into family-wide gates. |
The other seven — head-to-head, ranking-eval from your own sessions, per-language, onboarding, sibling sweep, command tour, showcase build The other seven — a paired head-to-head against a competitor, a ranking-eval loop that mines real retrieval misses from your own sessions, a per-language improvement pass, a zero-context onboarding study, a sibling sweep, a live command tour, a showcase build — are listed with their audiences in [`prompts/README.md`](prompts/README.md). Each states its own scope and its honesty rules, and most name the gates they must leave green.
### If it works on your codebase, tell us what it got wrong Every number on this page is a measurement on a corpus we happen to have. **Yours is one we don't.**
Send evidence, not an impression — prompts/improve-for-my-language.md harvests your session's own transcript, and every finding it produces has to cite the moment it came from After a session on your own repository — your first one counts, and counts most — hand your agent [`prompts/improve-for-my-language.md`](prompts/improve-for-my-language.md). It harvests that session's own transcript — where ripwire answered, where it missed, where you fell back to grep — and every finding it produces has to cite the moment it came from: what you asked, which command ran, what came back. Open an issue with the result. That is worth more to this project than a bug report, because it arrives in the form the project already runs on: evidence with its provenance attached, not an impression. Several languages here are one contributor's corpus away from being measurably better, and we cannot see your code.
--- ## Languages
22 vendored grammars, and what each parser does and does not see — CUDA launch edges, PHP dynamic dispatch, Lua metatables C, C++, Objective-C / Objective-C++, **Metal** (Metal Shading Language, `.metal` — indexed with the C++ grammar, since MSL is a C++14 dialect, so a dual-compile header's symbols resolve from both the GPU and CPU halves), **CUDA** (`.cu`/`.cuh` — indexed with the vendored `tree-sitter-cuda` grammar, so `kernel<<>>( … )` launch sites are real call edges and `--callers` of a kernel names its host-side launchers; `__constant__` module tables index as symbols even uninitialized — the `cudaMemcpyToSymbol` idiom — and SCREAMING_SNAKE `__device__`/`__managed__` globals join them; dual-compile `.cuh` headers resolve from both halves), Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Java, Ruby, **PHP** (`.php`/`.phtml` — classes, interfaces, traits, enums, functions, methods and constants; `$o?->m()` null-safe and `A::m()` static calls are edges; `use` directives are imports. Dynamic dispatch — `$fn()`, `call_user_func`, `__call` — names its callee at run time and is a stated floor, not a silence), **Lua** (all five spellings that define a function, including the `M.f = function` and table-constructor forms; `function M:f()` is a method. Metatable inheritance is a runtime call with no syntax to read, so a Lua corpus reports no inheritance edges — stated, not implied), **Elixir** (`.ex`/`.exs` — modules, protocols, protocol implementations, functions, macros, guards and delegates; literal ExUnit tests, local calls, remote calls and pipes; see the [static-analysis limits](docs/ARCHITECTURE.md#elixir-extraction)), Bash, Go, Rust, Swift, C#, JSON + TOML + YAML (config keys — a `[tool.ruff.lint]` table is one symbol under its full dotted name, and `pyproject.toml`/`Cargo.toml`/CI workflows become greppable), and **Markdown** (`.md`/`.markdown` — the DOC tier: every heading, ATX or setext, is a section symbol whose span runs to the next same-or-higher heading, so `--for` ranks the section, `--expand` serves the section body, `--recall` answers section-granular, and links/`backtick` mentions are doc→doc and doc→code edges). All grammars are vendored; [THIRD_PARTY.md](THIRD_PARTY.md) owns their inventory and provenance. Want another language? The pipeline is language-agnostic past the parse: a new language is a vendored tree-sitter grammar, its query file, and entries in the declarative `extension → { grammar, queries }` table (the "declarative constexpr tables" rule in [`CONTRIBUTING.md`](CONTRIBUTING.md)). Some grammars also need capture filters: Elixir, for example, represents definitions as ordinary calls. Open an issue naming the grammar and the repo you'd run it on. Notebooks, HTML and CSV are indexed as *documents* for `--recall` and the doc↔code edges behind `--mentions`; Office and PDF join them through an optional bridge. Markdown graduated from that tier: it parses with its own vendored grammar, so its headings are symbols, not just document text.
--- ## Documentation | Need | File | | --- | --- | | Every flag, with a real invocation and its recorded output | [`docs/COMMANDS.md`](docs/COMMANDS.md) | | The authoritative flag list, always current | `./build/ripwire --help` | | Pipeline, data model, determinism contract, output-honesty contract | [`docs/ARCHITECTURE.md`](docs/ARCHITECTURE.md) | | Every published number, its instrument, and what is *not* published | [`docs/EVALS.md`](docs/EVALS.md) | | Compiler optimization remarks: the triage, and the two opt-in faster builds | [`docs/OPTREMARKS.md`](docs/OPTREMARKS.md) | | The method, as something transferable | [`docs/METHODOLOGY.md`](docs/METHODOLOGY.md) | | Where every idea came from, and where each one lives in the code | [`docs/LINEAGE.md`](docs/LINEAGE.md) | | C++ house style, the G1–G5 guardrails, gate discipline, the submission checklist | [`CONTRIBUTING.md`](CONTRIBUTING.md) | | Orientation for a coding agent working *on* this repository | [`CLAUDE.md`](CLAUDE.md) / [`AGENTS.md`](AGENTS.md) | | User-visible capabilities, behaviour changes, known limits | [`CHANGELOG.md`](CHANGELOG.md) | | Vendored dependencies and their licences | [`THIRD_PARTY.md`](THIRD_PARTY.md) | | The whole tool in 29 slides — the showcase deck | [`present/ripwire-showcase.pdf`](present/ripwire-showcase.pdf) ([pptx](present/ripwire-showcase.pptx), rebuilt by [`present/deck5_ripwire_build.js`](present/deck5_ripwire_build.js)) | If a document disagrees with `--help`, the document is the bug. Contributions are welcome — read [`CONTRIBUTING.md`](CONTRIBUTING.md) first, and [`CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md`](CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md). Security reports: [`SECURITY.md`](SECURITY.md). --- ## Licence Apache License 2.0 — see [`LICENSE`](LICENSE) for the full text. Copyright 2026 David Brewster Vendored third-party code keeps its own licence; every dependency is enumerated with its terms in [`THIRD_PARTY.md`](THIRD_PARTY.md).