Basemind

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The four pillars

Code — Tree-sitter outlines, symbol search, reference + caller + implementation graphs, call chains, git history per symbol, blame at symbol-level resolution.

Documents — Ingest + semantic search over PDFs, Office (Word/Excel/iWork), HTML, email, archives. Built-in OCR, layout detection, keyword + NER extraction, cross-encoder reranking. All ONNX bundled — no system install needed.

Memory — Per-repo scoped key-value + semantic vector storage. Clones of the same git origin automatically share memory; unrelated repos isolated.

Web — On-demand HTTP scrape + follow-link crawl. Pages chunk, embed, and land in the documents store under scope web:<host> for unified search.

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Context economy

basemind tools return paths, line numbers, and signatures — not file bodies — so a structural answer costs a fraction of the tokens of reading source. The plugin ships this as the agent's default operating discipline (carried in the MCP server instructions, the basemind skill, and the SessionStart hook):

• outline a file before opening it — then read only the span you need.
• search_symbols instead of grep/rg for a definition.
• find_references / find_callers instead of grepping call sites.
• workspace_grep instead of shelling out to ripgrep for regex over content.
• rescan after edits instead of reconnecting the server.
• Don't re-read a file basemind already mapped.

The plugin also ships a PreToolUse guard hook that reaches the agent at the moment it reaches for search: by default (BASEMIND_GUARD=nudge) it points Grep/Glob calls at the matching basemind tool, once per session. Set BASEMIND_GUARD=redirect to enforce it (the call is blocked with a pointer to the basemind tool) or BASEMIND_GUARD=off to disable.

The live statusline surfaces the payoff: estimated tokens saved vs a grep + read baseline.

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Feature table