Codebase Exploration with Repowise

This project has a Repowise intelligence layer. Before grepping and reading raw source to understand the codebase, reach for the Repowise MCP tools — they return documentation, ownership, history, decisions, and graph structure that plain file reads don't, usually in one round-trip instead of many.

Which tool for which question

Recommended flow

1. New area you don't know → get_overview() once.
2. A specific question → get_answer(question=…) first.

• High confidence → answer it, cite the paths.
• medium/low confidence → follow best_guesses[0].file or

fallback_targets[0] into get_context, then get_symbol for bytes.

1. A named symbol or a path → search_codebase(query="Name") /

search_codebase(query="path/to/file.py"); symbol hits pipe straight into get_symbol, file hits into get_context.

1. More files around a concept → search_codebase, then get_context on the

hits (batched), then get_symbol only for the bodies you actually need.

Fall back to raw Read/Grep only when the indexed context doesn't cover the specific detail the user asked about.

Trust signals — verify when

• _meta.stale_warning is present (the index has diverged from HEAD), or
• retrieval_quality is partial/weak, or
• a result's search_method is bm25.

Otherwise the response is current — act on it.

Error handling

• "No repositories found. Run 'repowise init' first." → suggest /repowise:init.
• get_answer/search_codebase come back empty → the repo may be in index-only

mode (no wiki). Fall back to get_context with explicit paths, and note that full mode (/repowise:init with an LLM provider) unlocks docs + semantic search.

• Tools fail to connect at all → the repowise binary may not be installed;

suggest /repowise:init.