Introduction

CodexA is a developer intelligence engine — a comprehensive CLI tool that brings semantic code search, AI-assisted understanding, and workspace tooling to your development workflow. It's designed for:

• AI agents that need reliable code search and analysis via MCP, HTTP bridge, or CLI
• Developers who want to find code by what it does, not just what it's named
• Teams exploring large codebases and understanding unfamiliar code
• CI pipelines that need automated quality gates and impact analysis

Key Capabilities

Semantic Search

Find code by concept, not keywords:

codex search "error handling"
codex search "authentication middleware"
codex search "database connection pooling"

36 CLI Commands

Comprehensive tooling from the terminal:

codex quality src/          # Code quality analysis
codex hotspots              # Find high-risk code
codex impact                # Blast radius analysis
codex explain MyClass       # Structural explanation

AI Agent Integration

Built-in tool protocol for AI coding assistants:

codex tool run semantic_search --arg query="auth" --json
codex serve --port 24842     # HTTP bridge
codex mcp                    # MCP server for Claude/Cursor

Quality & Metrics

Full quality pipeline with CI integration:

codex quality src/           # Radon complexity + Bandit security
codex gate                   # Pass/fail quality gates
codex metrics --trend        # Track quality over time

How It Works

1. Indexing — CodexA scans source files, parses ASTs with tree-sitter, extracts symbols, and chunks code
2. Embedding — Each chunk is converted to a 384-dimensional vector using sentence-transformers
3. Storage — Vectors stored in FAISS index, symbols in a registry, metadata in JSON
4. Search — Queries encoded to vectors, similar chunks found via cosine similarity, fused with BM25 keyword search
5. Analysis — Call graphs, dependency maps, quality metrics, and impact analysis built on top of the index

Why CodexA?

vs. grep/ripgrep

• Understands code meaning, not just text patterns
• Finds related code even with different terminology
• Quality analysis, hotspots, impact analysis built-in
• AI agent integration via MCP/HTTP/CLI

vs. IDE search

• Works across entire codebase from the command line
• Scriptable and automatable for CI/CD
• Semantic understanding beyond symbol search
• 8 structured tools for AI agents

vs. cloud code search

• 100% offline — no code leaves your machine
• No API keys or subscriptions required
• Fast local inference with sentence-transformers
• Privacy-first design

Design Philosophy

• Stdlib-first — Minimal dependencies, Python 3.11+ only
• Structured output — Every command supports --json for machine consumption
• Plugin-extensible — 22 hooks for customization
• AI-native — Built for both humans and AI agents
• Quality-aware — Complexity, security, and maintainability analysis built-in

Next Steps

• Install CodexA and get running in under a minute
• Quick Start — Index a project and start searching
• AI Agent Setup — Integrate with Copilot, Claude, or Cursor
• CLI Reference — All 36 commands documented