Getting oriented
Where it runs
One long-lived host holds the index; clients connect to it and disconnect freely. Where that host lives is your choice, and the answer changes nothing about how you address it.
Three shapes
On your machine
A single native binary, no runtime to install and no container required. Every agent on the machine shares one warm index — the parse is paid for once and each of them gets the whole codebase.
In a container
A multi-arch image, published with every release, paired with a compose file for the host and its volumes.
On your own infrastructure
The host runs inside your network. Teammates, CI, and hosted agents connect to the uplink, which authenticates every caller against your own identity provider before anything crosses the boundary. The code never leaves where you put it.
What actually needs a network
Worth being exact about, because for a tool that reads a whole codebase this is the first question.
| Capability | What it needs from the network |
|---|---|
| Indexing and parsing | None. Files are discovered, parsed, and stored locally in DuckDB. |
| The graph and all SQL | None. Every view, macro, and table function runs against the local database. |
| Addresses, globs, fragments | None. Symbol and line resolution is a local graph operation. |
| Text search — grep, regex, full text | None. |
| Git — history, blame, changes | None. Read live from your checkout. |
| Semantic search | None. A local embedding model ships inside the binary, so a fresh install has it with no account and no download. |
| Higher-precision embeddings and reranking | A cloud account. Without one, search falls back to its local ranking — less precise, still working. |
explain and read => question: | A cloud account. These synthesise with a language model and are the only capabilities that do not run without one. |
Every way in
The same index behind each of them.
| Way in | Who uses it |
|---|---|
| MCP | Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and anything else that speaks the protocol. |
| CLI | rql query, read, explore, explain, import, watch — the whole surface, scriptable. |
| gRPC | Your own tools, against the same host — everything the CLI can do, callable from code. |
This page names what exists. The depth behind every name ships inside the binary at help:///: the bounds, the failure modes, how they compose. It answers to explore and read exactly like your code does. Install it, and your agent has the manual.