Ohara Lineage

Ohara Lineage

This repository has been indexed by ohara, a local-first git-history lineage engine. Two MCP tools are available on the ohara server.

Use find_pattern when

• The user asks "how did we do X before?" / "is there a pattern for Y?"
• The user wants to add a feature similar to existing functionality ("retry like we did before", "make this look like the auth flow")
• You are about to write code that likely has prior art in this repo

Use explain_change when

• The user asks "why does this code look this way?" / "how did this get here?"
• The user wants git archaeology / blame for a function or specific line range
• You need the history of a block, function, or (file, start, end) range

Do NOT use these tools for

• Searching current code state — use Grep / Read instead
• Confirming a feature exists today (these surface history, not present state — a feature can be planned-but-unbuilt and still rank highly)
• Brand-new files or fresh repos with no commit history
• General programming / framework questions that don't depend on this repo

Reading the response

Both tools return a _meta.compatibility field describing the index state:

• compatible — proceed normally
• query_compatible_needs_refresh — queries still work; suggest ohara index --force for completeness
• needs_rebuild — find_pattern will refuse with a structured error. Surface the rebuild command (ohara index --rebuild --yes) to the user. Do not silently retry.
• unknown — pre-v0.7 index without metadata; suggest ohara index --force

For index lifecycle questions (when to run, --force vs --rebuild, etc.) see the ohara:indexing skill.

Quality signals to watch

• All combined_score values negative → low confidence. Treat as "no strong prior art" rather than acting on the top hit.
• provenance: "INFERRED" is normal for find_pattern (semantic match); explain_change returns "EXACT" because git blame is git-truth.
• recency_weight near 1.0 means the hit is recent; near 0.0 means old. The cross-encoder rerank already factors this in — don't double-discount.