Everyday workflows

Each recipe starts with the single command that usually answers the question, then the finer-grained commands to dig further.

“How does this part of the system work?”

ix overview IngestionService    # one-shot structural summary
ix contains IngestionService    # its members
ix callees parseFile            # what one of them calls

“What depends on this?” / “What breaks if I change it?”

ix impact verify_token          # blast radius in one answer
ix callers verify_token         # direct callers
ix imported-by verify_token     # everything that imports it
ix depends verify_token --depth 2

“Where is this defined?”

ix locate AuthProvider --kind class        # graph and text search together
ix search IngestionService --kind class    # by name, in the graph
ix text "verify_token" --language python   # literal text, via ripgrep

Pass --kind to ix search, which keeps results focused. A module-level constant is --kind constant, not function.

“Show me the code”

ix read verify_token            # a symbol's own span
ix read src/auth.py:10-50       # a line range
ix read src/auth.py --all       # a whole file (otherwise paged at 400 lines)

“Which code carries the most weight?”

ix rank --by dependents --kind class --top 10
ix inventory --kind function --path auth.py    # everything of a kind in one place

“How is the architecture holding up?”

ix smells                       # structural issues
ix subsystems --level 2         # subsystem scores
ix stats                        # graph statistics

“What changed?”

ix history <entity-id>          # how one entity changed
ix diff 1 5 --summary           # changes between two graph revisions

Give an agent a starting point

ix context builds a bounded, deterministic bundle about one target: the entity, its relationships, the evidence behind them, the other files most closely connected to it, and the recent commits to its file. It’s built to be pasted into a prompt or read by an agent.

ix context IngestionService --format llm
ix context IngestionService --max-tokens 6000     # a larger evidence budget (default 3000)
ix context IngestionService --save ingest-review  # keep it to resume or diff later
ix context --from-issue issue.md                  # start from a bug report instead of a name
gh issue view 42 --json body -q .body | ix context --from-issue -

With --from-issue, Ix resolves the file paths (including those in stack traces and GitHub links) and code names the issue mentions to up to three definitions, builds the bundle around the first, and ranks the other files by how well they match the issue’s text. When nothing resolves, it starts from the best-matching file.

Tips

• Decompose a big question into several targeted commands. Commands answer structural questions, not free-form prose.
• Use --limit to cap result sets.
• When chaining commands, reuse the exact entity IDs from a previous --format json result.
• If a name is ambiguous, --pick <n> (1-based) chooses a candidate without retyping a longer name.