ripwire: ripgrep of AI context (CLI+MCP) giving coding agents a map of any repo

Red Hat's Emerging Technologies group released ripwire, an open-source CLI and MCP server that generates a ranked, deterministic call graph for coding agents, aiming to replace grep-based exploration with token-budgeted answers about which symbols to touch, what breaks, and which tests to run. The tool supports 21 languages via vendored tree-sitter grammars and installs in one line, activating task-shaped skills for agents like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Gemini, opencode, and aider. On a sample repository, ripwire answered an incremental cache invalidation query in about 4.3K tokens, listing ranked symbols with risk annotations, one-hop call context, and confidence scores.

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. Languages: Rust · C++ · Objective-C/C++ · C · Metal · CUDA · Python · Go · Swift · TypeScript · JavaScript · Java · Ruby · PHP · Lua · Bash · C · JSON · TOML · YAML · Markdown — twenty-one vendored grammars languages , and adding another is a vendored tree-sitter grammar plus one row in a declarative table. 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: RIPWIRE REPO=redhat-et/ripwire bash -c "$ curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/redhat-et/ripwire/main/scripts/install.sh " ripwire . --for="incremental cache invalidation" One deterministic, token-budgeted answer: the relevant symbols, their callers, the change risks, and the tests that reach them. Run on this repository 2026-08-30 , that second line answers in about 4.3K tokens with: - 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. Every number on this page is a measurement on a corpus we happen to have. Yours is one we don't. After you have actually used it on your own repository for a while, hand your agent prompts/improve-for-my-language.md /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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. The actual wire format — what your agent reads minified XML; trimmed and line-wrapped here <ctx task="incremental cache invalidation" confidence="high" margin pct="20" bundle="compact" bodies="0" reason="compact-route" est tokens="3995" <sigs shown="23" total="40" capped="1" <d l="106" n="kCacheMagic" p="src/ingest cache.h" cx="0" in="0" churn="11" amp="71" pure="1" r="1" next="--expand=src/ingest cache.h:kCacheMagic" <doc incremental cache --cache : per-file content hash + raw facts so a re-run re-parses ONLY …</doc constexpr std::uint32 t kCacheMagic = …</d <d l="1307" n="spanTierMemoPath" p="src/ingest astquery.h" cx="1" in="2" churn="5" amp="44" r="2" … </d <d l="247" n="ingestCommitTree" p="src/dmm.h" cx="6" in="1" churn="6" amp="27" r="3" … </d … <d l="191" n="ingest" p="src/ingest.cpp" cx="4" in="14" churn="128" amp="266" tested="1" r="13" … </d … </sigs <hops shown="2" total="6" capped="1" noedge="2" <h l="1307" p="src/ingest astquery.h" n="spanTierMemoPath" <calls total="3" <c n="shaKeyedCachePath" l="1621"/ … </calls </h … </hops </ctx cx= complexity, churn= git edit frequency, amp= change amplification, r= rank; <hops 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 | measured at 5.0% of what that grep-and-read pass spends re-derived 2026-08-23 | 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 Django's migration autodetector, coloured by complexity. Thresholds are fixed, so the colour means the same thing on every repo you point it at. ripwire path/to/django/db/migrations --rank-by=rrf --top-k=120 --color-by=cx --html=map.html | <sub 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.</sub | <sub 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.</sub | 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. 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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 <term 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 <syms 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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/docs/EVALS.md 7-honest-counterexamples lists that and the other counterexamples this project publishes against itself. 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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/docs/EVALS.md 2-head-to-head-against-other-tools . 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 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 | 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/ /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 <ruff --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. <sub 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/ /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/bench/headtohead/r4-2026-08-06 and docs/EVALS.md /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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.</sub 🕵️ 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. <sub 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/ /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/bench/headtohead/r4-2026-08-06 and docs/EVALS.md /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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.</sub 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 <dir --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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/docs/EVALS.md , not hidden. Numbers re-derived 2026-08-08 on this tree; per-lane table and history in docs/EVALS.md §4 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/docs/EVALS.md . 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 . 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. Better Code: It automates the review judgments nobody has time to make — every lens from published research --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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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. 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." Tree-local numbers above are reproducible with the commands shown; the rest are dated, sourced measurements in docs/EVALS.md /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 <ctx task="incremental cache invalidation" route="routed: subtoken+body BM25 --for's default — no strong name hit, multi-word conceptual query" confidence="high" margin pct="20" bundle="compact" bodies="0" reason="compact-route" est tokens="3995" <sigs shown="23" total="40" capped="1" <d l="106" n="kCacheMagic" p="src/ingest cache.h" cx="0" ccx="0" in="0" churn="11" amp="71" pure="1" r="1" next="--expand=src/ingest cache.h:kCacheMagic" <doc incremental cache --cache : per-file content hash + raw facts so a re-run re-parses ONLY c…</doc constexpr std::uint32 t kCacheMagic = 0x4b505443</d <d l="1307" n="spanTierMemoPath" id="src/ingest astquery.h::rw::spanTierMemoPath" p="src/ingest astquery.h" cx="1" ccx="0" in="2" churn="5" amp="44" r="2" <doc Composed exactly the way every OTHER blob family is quality.h : one fixed-width identity hex pe…</doc inline std::string spanTierMemoPath const std::string&amp; diskPath </d <d l="247" n="ingestCommitTree" id="src/dmm.h::rw::dmm::ingestCommitTree" p="src/dmm.h" cx="6" ccx="5" in="1" churn="6" amp="27" r="3" <doc Ingest the tree at sha , materialized out of root &apos;s object store. …</doc inline bool ingestCommitTree const std::string&amp; root, const std::string&amp; sha, … </d <d l="841" n="mcpRefreshedThisRequest" id="src/mcpindex.h::rw::mcpRefreshedThisRequest" p="src/mcpindex.h" cx="1" ccx="0" in="2" churn="20" amp="43" r="4" <doc P1-15 — the reingest envelope field for a response whose handling ran an INCREMENTAL pass, …</doc inline bool mcpRefreshedThisRequest std::uint64 t passesAtEntry </d … </sigs <hops shown="2" total="6" capped="1" noedge="2" <h l="1307" p="src/ingest astquery.h" n="spanTierMemoPath" <calls total="3" <c n="shaKeyedCachePath" l="1621"/ <c n="headSnapRepoHex" l="1359"/ <c n="exclConfigHex" l="1554"/ </calls </h <h l="247" p="src/dmm.h" n="ingestCommitTree" <calls total="10" shown="7" capped="1" …</calls </h </hops </ctx 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 bash $ ripwire . --quality-panel --limit=1 <quality panel preset="default" families="6" enabled n="6" cut="2" eligible="6497" ranked="524" … <s p="src/graph.h:723" n="buildGraph" fam="4" of="6" fired="structural,confusion,historical,colocation" <e f="structural" counted="1" why="ccx=764 loc=1368 nest=8 humps=34 deep=315 ev=98 rrank=1"/ <e f="confusion" counted="1" why="atom-embedded-crement 4"/ <e f="historical" counted="1" why="hrank=12 churn=36"/ <e f="colocation" counted="1" why="crank=32"/ </s … </quality panel 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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/bench/ANSWERQUALITY.md and Measured measured . ▶ The whole tool in 29 slides /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/present/ripwire-showcase.pdf — every figure names the instrument that pins it <sub renders in your browser · pptx /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/present/ripwire-showcase.pptx beside it · the numbers behind it /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/docs/EVALS.md </sub 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 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="<task in words " 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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/docs/COMMANDS.md zoom-the-detail-ladder | "Show me more — but only where it pays." | --detail · --pack-signatures · --outline · --expand · --compress | | assess quality / structure /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/docs/COMMANDS.md self-diagnosis | "Is my setup actually working?" | --doctor | | security /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/docs/COMMANDS.md --scan-skillsdir | "Is this agent skill file safe to install?" | --scan-skill · --scan-skills | | knobs / modes /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/docs/COMMANDS.md knobs--modes | shape, format, cache, budget | --json · --format · --mcp | 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 eighteen 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. 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: RIPWIRE REPO=redhat-et/ripwire bash -c "$ curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/redhat-et/ripwire/main/scripts/install.sh " 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. git clone https://github.com/redhat-et/ripwire.git cd ripwire cmake -S . -B build && cmake --build build -j ./build/ripwire . the ranked map — start here on an unfamiliar repo 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, all 21 grammars 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: 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 Parses C/C++, Objective-C/C++, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Java, Ruby, PHP, Lua, Bash, Go, Rust, Swift, C — plus JSON/TOML/YAML config keys, markdown sections, Metal, and CUDA <<< launches are call edges . 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: 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: ripwire . the ranked map — start here 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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 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. 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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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<T /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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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. 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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/docs/LINEAGE.md . 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 <u 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: bash $ ripwire . --callers=rankGraphTeleport <callers of="rankGraphTeleport" defs="1" count="6" root="." hop tested="0" hop untested="6" counts floor="1" <s t="fn" n="runEval" p="src/eval.h:169"/ <s t="fn" n="rankGraph" p="src/graph.h:2581"/ <s t="fn" n="anchoredLexicalRank" p="src/graph.h:3130"/ <s t="fn" n="churnRankedGraph" p="src/main.cpp:983"/ <s t="fn" n="runDefaultMap" p="src/main.cpp:1101"/ <s t="fn" n="getIndex" p="src/mcpindex.h:1104"/ </callers 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: bash $ ripwire . --top-k=3 < -- files=… symbols=… edges=… shown=3 est tokens=… ambiguous=… unresolved=… precise=… skipped oversize=… order=important-first -- <r est tokens="435" <f p="./src/infra/svector.h" layer="infra" <s t="method" n="size" id="./src/infra/svector.h::svector::size" k="…" </s <s t="method" n="push back" id="./src/infra/svector.h::svector::push back" amb="2" k="…" <c n="buf"/ <c n="buf"/ <c n="grow"/ </s </f <f p="./src/scipoverlay.h" <s t="method" n="empty" id="./src/scipoverlay.h::ScipOverlay::empty" k="…" </s </f </r 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: bash $ ripwire . --test-gate exit code: 4 <test-gate changed="1" impacted="80" tests="2" untested="76" shown tests="2" tests capped="0" shown untested="25" untested capped="1" script gates unmodelled="332" at="9cf0b16f3+dirty" <t p="./test/adaptivecutshapefix/adaptive cut shape test.cpp" run="bash test/adaptivecutshapecheck.sh"/ <t p="./test/verify radix.cpp"/ <u sym="buildGraph" p="./src/graph.h" ccx="712"/ <u sym="dispatchMcpLine" p="./src/mcp.h" ccx="428"/ … </test-gate 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 <u 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: ./build/ripwire . --from-trace=asan report.txt cmake --build build 2 &1 | ./build/ripwire . --from-trace=- 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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 <f via="import" 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 <hops 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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 <rule name= count= shown rows= rows capped=/ 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 <rule 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. Every published number lives in docs/EVALS.md /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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. 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/ /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 all twelve indexed 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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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/ /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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/ /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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% 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. 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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/docs/EVALS.md . 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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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. Almost none of the ideas here are new; the combination and the constraints are. Lessons folded from 41 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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 differentiator is not a number, it is a discipline: a measurement you cannot check is a claim, and this tool ships the check. 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 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. 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/ /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/bench/headtohead/r9-2026-08-09 . 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. 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. test/regression.sh names 547 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. 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: 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. ripwire wrap <agent prints the recipe for the agent you name. It prints ; it never edits your config — you read the line, then run it. 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 — 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/ /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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: { "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. 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: 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 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. prompts/ /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/prompts holds eleven 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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/prompts/README.md . Each states its own scope and its honesty rules, and most name the gates they must leave green. 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<<<grid, block … 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 , 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 . Twenty-one tree-sitter grammars, all vendored. Want another language? The pipeline is language-agnostic past the parse: a new language is a vendored tree-sitter grammar, its query file, and one row in the declarative extension → { grammar, queries } table the "declarative constexpr tables" rule in CONTRIBUTING.md /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md — 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. | Need | File | |---|---| | Every flag, with a real invocation and its recorded output | docs/COMMANDS.md /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/docs/COMMANDS.md | | The authoritative flag list, always current | ./build/ripwire --help | | Pipeline, data model, determinism contract, output-honesty contract | docs/ARCHITECTURE.md /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/docs/ARCHITECTURE.md | | Every published number, its instrument, and what is not published | docs/EVALS.md /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/docs/EVALS.md | | Compiler optimization remarks: the triage, and the two opt-in faster builds | docs/OPTREMARKS.md /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/docs/OPTREMARKS.md | | The method, as something transferable | docs/METHODOLOGY.md /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/docs/METHODOLOGY.md | | Where every idea came from, and where each one lives in the code | docs/LINEAGE.md /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/docs/LINEAGE.md | | C++ house style, the G1–G5 guardrails, gate discipline, the submission checklist | CONTRIBUTING.md /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md | | Orientation for a coding agent working on this repository | CLAUDE.md /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/AGENTS.md | | User-visible capabilities, behaviour changes, known limits | CHANGELOG.md /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md | | Vendored dependencies and their licences | THIRD PARTY.md /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/THIRD PARTY.md | | The whole tool in 29 slides — the showcase deck | present/ripwire-showcase.pdf /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/present/ripwire-showcase.pdf pptx /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/present/ripwire-showcase.pptx , rebuilt by present/deck5 ripwire build.js /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/present/deck5 ripwire build.js | If a document disagrees with --help , the document is the bug. Contributions are welcome — read CONTRIBUTING.md /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md first, and CODE OF CONDUCT.md /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/CODE OF CONDUCT.md . Security reports: SECURITY.md /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/SECURITY.md . Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/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 /redhat-et/ripwire/blob/main/THIRD PARTY.md .