Search code with the code graph

This guide shows you how to get a repo into the code graph and then use it to answer the question you actually have before a refactor: what depends on this?

The code graph is a symbol-and-edge database built by parsing your registered checkouts with tree-sitter. Its tools are agent-facing — you reach them by asking an agent, not from a code-graph screen. There is no human-facing view of the graph at all today: the blast-radius pane that was one went with Review Studio.

Before you start

Two more things shape what gets indexed:

In a git work tree, enumeration defers to git ls-files --cached --others --exclude-standard, so every .gitignore, nested ignore file, .git/info/exclude and the global excludes file is honoured. That is what keeps node_modules and build output out of the graph.
Generated Dart is dropped regardless. Generated files are usually committed, so git alone would not exclude them and they churn on every codegen run.

Get a repo indexed

Registering a checkout fires RepoAdded, which starts the index_code pipeline for it automatically. See Add repos to a workspace.

To re-index by hand:

Open Settings → Workspace → Repositories.
Click the Index code button on the repo’s row.
While it runs the button shows files done over total, with a cancel control. When it finishes it settles into a check with the symbol count.

The graph is partitioned by workspace and repo, so each workspace-plus-repo pair has its own graph.

Two throttles are worth knowing about, because they explain a wait that looks like a hang:

Only one index run may be in flight at a time across all workspaces. A second repo queues.
Worktrees belonging to dormant spaces are neither watched nor indexed. The judgement is re-evaluated every five minutes, so a space that becomes active again gets picked up.

Find a symbol

Ask an agent to search. The tool is search_code and it needs both a workspace and a repo:

search_code(workspace_id: "...", repo_id: "...", query: "authentication middleware")

Repo ids come from list_repos. The optional mode argument is keyword, semantic or hybrid and it defaults to hybrid — BM25 over names, signatures and doc comments, fused with vector similarity.

Each result carries the symbol’s id, name, qualified name, kind, file path, start and end line and its signature when it has one. The id is the handle you feed to every other tool on this page.

When you know the exact name, look it up directly instead:

code_symbol(workspace_id: "...", repo_id: "...", name: "MyClass")

Trace calls

Both take a symbol_id from a search result, plus an optional limit (default 50):

code_callers(workspace_id: "...", symbol_id: "...")
code_callees(workspace_id: "...", symbol_id: "...")

code_callers returns the symbols with an incoming edge to this one; code_callees returns the ones it depends on.

Check what a change would break

This is the tool the whole page exists for:

code_impact(workspace_id: "...", symbol_id: "...", depth: 3)

It computes the reverse-dependency radius: everything that directly or transitively depends on the symbol. depth is the maximum number of hops, between 1 and 6, defaulting to 2.

The result is three fields:

root — the symbol you asked about
impacted — every dependent symbol, each carrying its depth from the root
edgeCount — how many edges the traversal crossed, as a count rather than the edges themselves

Run it before you rename or change a signature and give the agent the impacted list as its scope.

Results are checked against the caller’s own working copy

For an agent caller, the conversation id is injected automatically and results are verified against that conversation’s checkout. A symbol whose file no longer exists in the caller’s tree is omitted and the response carries a staleOmitted count plus a note saying the index is stale for those symbols.

This is why you and an agent can get different answers to the same query and why an agent in one space can get a different answer from an agent in another. Verification fails open: a stale answer is preferred to an empty one.

See the graph as a human

You cannot, today. The blast-radius pane lived in Review Studio, and that surface was folded into the PR’s review artifact tab — the graph view went with it. review_studio.blastRadius still answers over RPC and the cohort grouping still falls back to plain paths on an unindexed repo, but nothing in the app draws either. See Review Studio.

Semantic search needs the embedding model

Symbols and facts are embedded at write time and only when the on-device embedding model is installed. Until then, mode: "semantic" and the semantic half of hybrid have nothing to match against and search is effectively keyword-only.

Note also that any rebuild of the server binary re-stages the grammar dylibs and changes their mtimes, which invalidates every index checkpoint and forces one full re-walk of every checkout on the next run. It re-hashes, but it does not re-extract unchanged files.

What is in the graph

Symbol kinds: function, method, class, field, enum, constructor, getter, setter, typedef, extension, mixin, variable.

Edge kinds: calls, imports, extends, implements, mixes in, references.

The canonical signatures for these tools live in MCP tools.

Workspaces and isolation