ripwire

ripwire is an open-source C++23 command-line tool and MCP server for coding agents, published under the redhat-et GitHub organization. It crawls a repository, builds a deterministic call graph and returns compact XML answers that tell an agent what to touch, what a change affects and which tests to run. The README describes it as "the ripgrep of AI context".

What It Is

ripwire sits between a coding agent and a codebase. Instead of grepping and reading whole files, the agent runs a command such as ripwire . --for="<task>" and gets a ranked set of relevant symbols with their callers, complexity, churn and test coverage inline. It runs as a single process on the local machine with no API key, embeddings, index server or daemon. By default its output is XML sized for an AI agent to read, not for a person.

How the Workflow Works

The workflow has two jobs. The first is orientation: ripwire . returns a ranked map of subsystems, entry points and important symbols. The second is asking questions, with verbs such as --for, --expand, --callers, --impact, --path, --from-trace, --pack-task, --situ and --pr-context. After an edit, --edit-check flags contract changes, --quality-delta reports only what got worse, and --test-gate names the tests that must run. Every truncation is disclosed, counts that cannot be proven totals are labelled as floors, and a zero means "none found".

Quality Analysis

--quality-panel joins six independent evidence families (structural shape, naming, confusing idioms, git churn, colocation and non-local state). It ranks functions by how many families agree rather than by one blended score. Related lenses include --hotspots, --clones, --lint, --field-affinity and --html, which writes a self-contained call-graph visualization.

Setup and Agent Integration

A one-line installer downloads a prebuilt binary for macOS on Apple silicon and Linux on arm64 or x86-64, and installs agent skills for detected agents. A Windows x64 preview zip is also published. The project can be built from source with CMake 3.24+ and a C++23 compiler, with dependencies vendored. The README names Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Gemini, opencode and aider as agents that can call the CLI, and ripwire wrap prints per-client MCP wiring recipes. The README also describes 25+ source and document formats, including Python, Rust, TypeScript, Go and Swift, parsed with tree-sitter.

Measurements the Project Reports

The README publishes its own benchmarks, which are vendor-reported. Its table of ten everyday tasks lists token savings versus naive grep-and-read, and a head-to-head against other code-context tools on a LocBench slice reports 58.3% strict file@10 against 40.0% for the best alternative. It also states where it loses and links to docs/EVALS.md for method and counterexamples.