Mainly I wrote it because I noticed Claude's "by design" use of grep meant it couldn't search the code base for things it didn't already know the name of, or find "the auth section". But equally, it's well documented that e.g. Cursor's old RAG technique wasn't that great.
My idea was to make a tool that just does a quick and simple embedding on each file, and uses that to provide a semantic alternative that is much closer to grep in nature, but allows an AI tool like Claude Code to run it from the command line - with some parameters.
Arguably could be MCP, but in my experience setting up a server for a basic tool like this is a whole lot of hassle.
I'm fairly confident that this is a useful tool for CC as it started using it while I was coding it, and even when buggy, was more than willing to work around the issues for the benefit of having semantic search!
Fair comment- the initial thinking was to have both and in fact a hybrid mode too which fuses results so you can get chunks that match both semantically and on keyword search in one resultset. Later could add a reranker too.
Yes- files are hashed and checked whenever you search so index should always remain up to date. Only changed files are reindexed. You can also inspect the metadata (chunking semantics, embeddings). It’s all in the .ck sidecar
Note that it’s grep AND semantic - so Claude can start with a grep strategy and if it finds nothing can switch to semantic, and since it’s local and fast, it keeps in sync easily enough
bear in mind that Claude Code by default uses grep - if you watch you'll see if it's looking for something it doesn't know the name of, it flails around with different patterns. Try this tool, tell CC to take a look using ck --help and take it for a spin.
CC in my case likes it so much, it started using it to debug the repo rather than grep and suggesting its own additions