The code index

What it saves

Without an index, an agent searches with grep, then reads the files it found, often whole. With the index, it asks in one call:

• where a symbol is (function, method, class, type, field, Markdown heading), with its signature and doc;
• the context of a task: the entry points and the related symbols, with their excerpts;
• the callers and the callees of a function;
• what a change would touch.

Each answer says what it saved: the tokens of the files it draws on, read whole, against its own. The statistics add them up per project.

The languages read: Rust, TypeScript, JavaScript, Svelte, Python, Go, Java, C#, PHP and Markdown.

Turning it on

The index is off by default. Escouade offers it:

• when a project is added, at the last step of the “New project” assistant (Index the code);
• in Settings › Projects › Code index (Index this project), at any time.

Once on, the project is read once, then kept up to date without a file watcher: at each question of the agents (every 3 seconds at most), on commits, branch changes and the ends of turns. The setting says what it holds: its files, its symbols, its size and when it was read. Turning it off erases the index.

The agents’ worktrees are not indexed whole: the index of the base branch serves them all, and each worktree only adds what differs from it.

Nothing leaves the machine

The index is computed on your machine and kept in Escouade’s folder, never in the repository nor in an online service. Only the agents get excerpts of it, as they already get code. Files git ignores are not read.

Private projects

The index of a private project serves its own agents alone: those of the other projects never reach it, by name or by id. What its fence refuses is never read nor indexed; when another project sits inside its folder, the setting names it: “Left out of the index: …”. Likewise, an open project that holds a private project inside its folder leaves it out of its index.

Search by meaning

Besides the words, a project’s shared memory and docs are searched by meaning, with a small multilingual model (multilingual-e5-base, MIT license) that runs on your machine. It is downloaded once for every project, from Settings › Projects › Code index › Search by meaning (282 MB):

• a gauge shows how far the download is, and Cancel stops it;
• what came is kept: Resume goes on from there;
• the file is checked by its SHA-256 and goes through the proxy of the network settings;
• Delete removes it; the search then goes by the words alone.

Once the model is downloaded, nothing leaves the machine any more.

What the agents see

The agents go through five tools of the MCP server, the same for every harness: index_search, index_context, index_callers, index_callees and index_impact. In the Claude Code and Codex views, a search aimed at a symbol gets a line saying the index answers it in one call; elsewhere, it is a rule of their instructions. A text search is never blocked.

What it saved

The statistics have a Code index savings part, over the period chosen: per project, the number of answers of the index, the tokens saved and their worth in dollars. The dollars are an estimate: the tokens saved at the input price of the model each agent ran on.