Take cat away from your agent. Guard hooks block cat, raw grep, and full-file reads and rewrite each into a token-budgeted ccx call for an outline, a symbol with its callers, or a diff.

Get started

/plugin marketplace add yasyf/cc-skills
/plugin install cc-context@skills

The plugin arrives wired together: the ccx binary self-provisions (a shim downloads the pinned release on first use and caches it in ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_DATA}), the MCP server auto-registers its mcp__cc-context__ccx_* tools plus BashToon, the guard hooks turn on, and the ccx skill teaches the reach-for-ccx-first workflow. It needs uv on PATH — the hooks run through uvx capt-hook, and semantic search shells out to semble via uvx.

Driving with an agent? Paste this:

/plugin marketplace add yasyf/cc-skills
/plugin install cc-context@skills

Using ccx outside Claude Code? Install the standalone CLI

The Homebrew formula pulls in ast-grep and uv:

brew install yasyf/tap/ccx

Without the plugin, register the MCP server by hand:

claude mcp add --scope user --transport stdio cc-context -- ccx mcp

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Use cases

Orient in an unfamiliar repo in one command

Cold-starting in a codebase you've never seen burns the first few thousand tokens on ls and cat wandering. One command replaces the tour:

ccx repo overview

[tilth] Go project — 75 source files, 10 directories
  dirs: cli/ backend/ astgrep/ vcs/ render/ toon/ outline/ mcpserver/ querykind/ locate/
  deps: asm, cobra, encoding, go-sdk, jsonschema-go, mousetrap, oauth2, pflag, sys, toon-go
  hot (× = importers): bench/ccxbench/types.py ×7, bench/ccxbench/config.py ×4, plugin/hooks/common.py ×4
  git: branch main, clean
  manifest: go.mod (github.com/yasyf/cc-context)

Structure, dependencies, the hottest files by importer count, and VCS state — a few hundred tokens instead of a directory crawl.

Pull one symbol with its callers, not the whole file

Understanding one function shouldn't cost a whole-file read plus a grep for its call sites. Ask for the symbol:

ccx code symbol NewRootCmd

# grok: NewRootCmd [internal/cli/root.go:11]

## signature
func NewRootCmd() *cobra.Command

## doc
// NewRootCmd builds the root command and registers its subcommands.

## body
…

## callees (4 internal, 5 extern)
…

## callers (5 of 6)
  internal/cli/cli_test.go
    [30]   in TestRootHelpListsAllOps()
…

Definition, doc, body, callees, and callers in one budgeted response — the agent edits code it never paged through.

Cut gh and kubectl JSON output by 40–60%

gh --json and kubectl -o json dump verbose, nested JSON that floods the context window. Run the command through ccx toon and its JSON or NDJSON stdout comes back as TOON, a compact tabular encoding (or compact JSON when that is smaller):

ccx toon -- gh release list --limit 3 --json tagName,publishedAt,isLatest

[3]{isLatest,publishedAt,tagName}:
  true,"2026-06-26T01:05:28Z",v0.2.1
  false,"2026-06-23T07:52:46Z",v0.2.0
  false,"2026-06-21T09:21:47Z",v0.1.1

That's less than half the bytes of the raw JSON, and typically 40–60% fewer tokens on tabular data. Non-JSON output passes through verbatim, stderr streams live, the exit code is propagated, and it doubles as a pipe filter (… | ccx toon). The MCP BashToon tool is the same wrapper in tool form.

The guard pack enforces it

A budgeted command only helps if the agent reaches for it. The bundled capt-hook guard pack makes that the path of least resistance: its PreToolUse/PostToolUse hooks block the token-heavy primitives — cat, raw grep, an unbounded full-file Read, a git diff through a pager — and point the agent at the ccx equivalent instead. Reach for the raw tool and the hook turns you back; reach for ccx and you stay inside the budget by default.

The pack also watches for JSON. A command flagged for JSON output (--json, -o json) gets rewritten to run through ccx toon, and the pack learns which commands emit JSON so it can nudge you to wrap them next time.

Commands

Each command is a token-bounded stand-in for a primitive an agent would otherwise reach for. Structural output is capped at --budget tokens, cut on a line boundary, with an explicit marker saying how much was dropped:

Command	What it does
ccx repo overview	Repository structure and entry points; start here
ccx code search <query> [path]	Search routed by query kind: natural language runs semantic, an ast-grep pattern ($A, $$$) runs structural
ccx code replace <pattern> <rewrite> [paths...]	Structural find-replace; previews a diff, writes only with --apply
ccx code related <file:line>	Code semantically related to a location
ccx code symbol <name> (alias grok)	Definition, doc, body, callers, callees, siblings, tests
ccx code outline <file-or-dir>	Token-budgeted structural outline of a file or directory
ccx code read <file> --section A-B	Read a line range, a ## Heading, or the whole file with --full
ccx code deps <file>	Symbols a file uses, and what uses it back
ccx code grep <text> --glob G	Literal text search, optionally globbed and budgeted
ccx repo find <glob>	List files matching a glob, with per-file token counts
ccx repo locate <name>	Resolve a sibling repo, Go module, or Python package to its on-disk path; exits 3 when unresolved
ccx vcs diff [uncommitted|staged|<ref>]	VCS-aware structural diff; defaults to uncommitted
ccx vcs show [ref]	Commit message plus a structural per-file diff of one commit; defaults to the last commit
ccx vcs history <path> [-n N]	Per-commit summary of a file's changed symbols; replaces git log -p
ccx vcs ship [-m <msg>]	Commit, push, and watch CI in one call: jj-aware commit, push, gh run watch --exit-status
ccx toon [-- <cmd>]	Re-encode a command's JSON/NDJSON output as TOON, or filter a pipe

Run ccx <command> --help for the full flag set, and ccx --version for the build version. Three engines sit behind the one surface — semble for semantic search, ast-grep for structural search and rewrites, tilth for the rest — and ccx routes each command for you.

Configuration

ccx reads no config file; behavior is tuned through environment variables:

Variable	Effect
LOG_LEVEL	debug, info (default), warn, or error; logs go to stderr
LOG_FORMAT	set to json for structured logs
CLAUDE_PLUGIN_DATA	cache directory for the downloaded ccx, tilth, and ast-grep binaries

Licensed under PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0.