Every codebase has lore. Ask it, then check it against the code.
relore indexes a repository's complete issue and pull-request history and keeps a working
clone beside it, both served over one HTTP API. Three questions, in the order an agent hits
them:
1. Is somebody already doing this? inflight <issue> — every open claimant, its state
and its author, in one hop. The most expensive thing an agent does is patch something that
is already in review.
2. Why is it like this? Why a fallback cannot be removed, which approach was tried and
rejected, what a maintainer made the last five contributors change — none of it is in the
codebase. thread, why PATH:LINE and search return it at comment level with who said
it attached, so --trust authoritative keeps only what someone with write access settled
and machine authors are excluded by default. search --symbol GemmaRotaryEmbedding asks
what has been said about a function — a question grep cannot answer.
3. Is that still true? grep, symbol and copies run against that clone at HEAD,
server-side, no checkout on your side. A three-year-old review is a claim about code that
has moved since.
Threads tell you what people decided; the code verbs tell you whether it was true. A
[contributor claim] confirmed by grep is stronger evidence than either alone — the
argument for this over a search box.
Six agents have run it cold on the same transformers bug, one per release, on --help
alone and with no memory of the runs before. They filed 39 issues against the tool; most
are fixed, each run checking the last one's from the outside.
#8 is the record.
pip install git+https://github.com/huggingface/relore # no PyPI release yet
export RELORE_API=https://your-relore # a running `relored serve`
export RELORE_REPO=owner/name # the default for --repo
export RELORE_TOKEN=… # if that daemon requires one
relore inflight 47720 --repo owner/name # ask this one first
relore why src/model.py:90 --repo owner/name # what was said about this line
relore search "AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'shape'" --kind failure
relore search "why is this cast here" --kind rationale --file src/model.py
relore search --symbol GemmaRotaryEmbedding # every mention, exactly matched
relore copies compute_default_rope_parameters --repo owner/name # which copies diverge--repo is required on a bare number or path whenever the daemon serves more than one
repository: it refuses rather than guessing which project you meant. RELORE_REPO is the
default that makes the flag a per-call override instead of a per-call tax.
relore --help is the reference — every verb, the order to reach for them in, and the
environment. More worked queries, and the four ways a healthy index returns nothing:
docs/cli.md. There is no MCP server on purpose: any agent with a shell can
already call an HTTP API.
The trade is freshness: an answer is at most one poll interval behind. Why not GitHub search has the measurements.
Running the daemon needs a Postgres and a GitHub token with issues:read +
pull_requests:read — never write. deploy/ has a Helm chart and the scripts that are its
interface; setup is in docs/operations.md.
docs/how-search-works.md— what kind of index this is (lexical and ranked, no embeddings), and what it is better and worse at thangrep.docs/cli.md— worked queries, and the empty results that are not faults.docs/why-not-github-search.md— the comparison.docs/architecture.md— what is indexed, what is deliberately not, the symbol lens, and language plugins.docs/agents.md— wiring it into a harness (not to be confused withAGENTS.mdbelow, which is the contributor contract for this repository).docs/ranking.md— the scoring model and what the benchmark says.docs/operations.md— backfill, poll, clones, tokens, serving.docs/security.md— the properties and how each is enforced.docs/prior-art.md— related work, and what was borrowed.AGENTS.md— the operating contract: the invariants with tests behind them.