Getting Started

vectorless-code is a code-aware search engine built on vectorless. It indexes your codebase using tree-sitter AST parsing and answers questions via LLM reasoning — no embeddings, no vector database.

Install

pip install vectorless-code

Quick Start

# Initialize in your project directory
cd your-project
vcc init

This creates .vectorless_code/settings.yml with default include/exclude patterns.

# Compile the codebase
vcc compile

This discovers code files, parses them with tree-sitter into semantic nodes (functions, classes, methods), and feeds them to the vectorless engine.

# Ask a question
vcc ask "where is the authentication logic"

How It Works

vcc compile
  │
  ├─ File Discovery (gitignore-aware)
  │
  ├─ AST Parsing (tree-sitter)
  │   ├─ Per-language SPLITTABLE_NODE_TYPES
  │   └─ Fallback: line-based splitting
  │
  ├─ Incremental (SHA-256 per-file hashing)
  │   ├─ Changed/new → re-parse
  │   └─ Unchanged → reuse cached raw_nodes
  │
  └─ Engine.compile(raw_nodes=...)
       └─ BuildPass → EnrichPass → ReasoningPass → NavigationPass

Configuration

Project Settings

.vectorless_code/settings.yml:

# File patterns to include
include_patterns:
  - "**/*.py"
  - "**/*.rs"
  - "**/*.ts"

# File patterns to exclude
exclude_patterns:
  - "**/.*"
  - "**/node_modules"
  - "**/target"

API Key

# Option 1: Environment variable
export VECTORLESS_API_KEY="sk-..."

# Option 2: Prompted during vcc init
vcc init

Supported Languages

Language	Extensions	AST Parsing
Python	.py, .pyi	Yes
Rust	.rs	Yes
Go	.go	Yes
JavaScript	.js, .jsx, .mjs	Yes
TypeScript	.ts, .tsx	Yes
Java	.java	Yes
C	.c, .h	Yes
C++	.cpp, .hpp, .cc	Yes
Ruby	.rb	Yes
Swift	.swift	Yes
Kotlin	.kt	Yes
Scala	.scala	Yes
Others	.sql, .sh, .lua, etc.	Fallback (line-based)

CLI Reference

Command	Description
vcc init	Initialize project settings
vcc compile	Compile codebase into searchable index
vcc ask <question>	Ask a question about the codebase
vcc status	Show compilation status and statistics