Fnord is a command line tool the builds a searchable database of your files, using AI-generated embeddings to index and search your code base, notes, and other (non-binary) files.

1. Install elixir if necessary:

# MacOS
brew install elixir

# Debian-based
sudo apt-get install elixir

2. Add the mix escript path to your shell's PATH:

echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.mix/escripts:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

3. Install the script:

mix escript.install github sysread/fnord

Use the same command to reinstall. It will offer to overwrite the existing installation.

The first time you run this, especially on a large codebase, it will take a while to index everything. Subsequent runs will be faster, re-indexing only those files which have changed since they were last indexed.

fnord index --project foo --dir /path/to/foo

You can reindex the project, forcing it to reindex all files:

fnord index --project foo --dir /path/to/foo --reindex

You can also watch the project for changes and reindex them as they happen using watchman. Just be sure to use --quiet to suppress interactive output:

watchman-make -p '**/*' --settle 5 --run "fnord index --project $project --dir $project_root --quiet"

...or use the fnord-watch script in the tools directory on GitHub.

fnord-watch -p foo -d /path/to/foo

fnord search --project foo --query "some search query"

If you want more detail about each file matched:

fnord search --project foo --query "some search query" --detail

You can ask the AI assistant to answer questions about your project:

fnord ask foo "how do you run the tests for this project?"

# Continue the conversation
fnord ask -C foo "how does the test coverage look to you?"

# With status messages emitted to stderr
fnord ask -C --debug foo "if the test coverage is so amazing then how come my change didn't break any tests?!"

# Pipe output to `glow` to render markdown
fnord ask foo "summarize the dependencies of this project" | glow

• List projects: fnord projects
• List files in a project: fnord files --project foo
• Show the AI-generated summary of a file: fnord summary --project foo --file bar
• Delete a project: fnord delete --project foo

Note that deleting a project only deletes from the index, not the actual files.

Internally, the ask command uses the OpenAI chat completions API to generate a response, implementing a function tool to allow the assistant to query the database for information.

fnord can be used to implement a similar tool for your own projects. While the ask command severely limits the parameters that the assistant may utilize (query only, with project being provided by the user's invocation of the command), the following syntax includes the full set of parameters available for the search command.

{
  "name": "search_tool",
  "description": "Searches for matching files and their contents in a project.",
  "parameters": {
    "type": "object",
    "properties": {
      "project": {
        "type": "string",
        "description": "Project name for the search."
      },
      "query": {
        "type": "string",
        "description": "The search query string."
      },
      "detail": {
        "type": "boolean",
        "description": "Include AI-generated file summary if set to true."
      },
      "limit": {
        "type": "integer",
        "description": "Limit the number of results (default: 10)."
      },
      "concurrency": {
        "type": "integer",
        "description": "Number of concurrent threads to use for the search (default: 4)."
      }
    },
    "required": ["project", "query"]
  }
}

• ask: read questions from stdin
• ask: add agent to summarize file in relation to user prompt in lieu of injecting entire files into the conversation