GUIDES

Code intelligence

In-process symbol, call-graph, and search indexing that powers the codeintel MCP tools.

Code intelligence (codeintel) is SuperBased's in-process, CGO-free engine for symbol extraction, call graphs, and search across your project's source. It backs three MCP tools and runs entirely locally.

What it does

At index time it extracts symbols, imports, and a name-matched call graph, then persists them to NODE-LOCAL codeintel_* tables. Queries are served from that index - no external companion process.

It powers:

get_symbols - resolve a symbol name + range to its file path and body.
get_relations - BFS over the call graph: who calls / is called by a symbol.
search_symbols - fuzzy symbol search across the whole project.

These let your agent navigate the codebase by symbol instead of re-reading files - cheaper context, fewer stale reads.

Index a project

observer index .                 # index the current project's source tree
observer codeintel explain <file>   # inspect what was extracted

How parsing works

Parsing uses tree-sitter compiled to WebAssembly via wazero - CGO-free - with go/ast and heuristic fallbacks. Several languages (Rust, TypeScript, TSX, Python) parse to exact spans (precise call graph, body-collapsible); others fall back to heuristics. It's offline-only: no network calls during indexing.

Code intelligence replaced the older external codegraph companion in v1.12.0. Legacy [compression.code_graph] / [intelligence.code_graph] config blocks are mapped onto [codeintel] with a deprecation warning for one release.

Configure

Under [codeintel] in ~/.observer/config.toml.