neuralmind

Index any repo with just pip (no graphify)

Best for: anyone trying NeuralMind for the first time, CI jobs, and fresh/locked-down machines where installing a second indexing tool is friction or impossible.

Primary goal: go from nothing to a queryable index in one pip install and one build — no external graph tool.

Before v0.15.0 you had to install and run a separate tool (graphify) before neuralmind build would do anything. That extra step was the #1 onboarding drop-off. NeuralMind now ships a built-in tree-sitter graph backend, so the whole flow is two commands.


The 30-second path

pip install neuralmind
cd /path/to/your-repo
neuralmind build .

On the first build with no graphify-out/graph.json present, NeuralMind parses your code with the bundled tree-sitter backend and prints:

[neuralmind] generated code graph via the built-in tree-sitter backend → graphify-out/graph.json

Then query it like normal:

neuralmind query "how does authentication work?" .
neuralmind wakeup .          # ~400-token project orientation

That’s it. No second install, no separate graph step.


What you get (and what you don’t)

The built-in backend produces a graphify-compatible graph — symbol-level code nodes (files, classes, functions/methods), contains / imports_from / inherits / calls edges, and a docstring-derived rationale layer. The entire retrieval pipeline downstream — progressive L0–L3 disclosure, the synapse layer, the graph view, the MCP tools — works exactly the same. Only the graph producer changed.


Want graphify’s richer graph instead?

Install it and it takes priority automatically — no flag needed:

pip install neuralmind
neuralmind build .

Precedence rules:

You can switch either direction later without losing your .neuralmind/ state — it’s on disk in the project, not in the install.


Why trust the built-in backend?

Because the swap is proven at parity, not asserted. Every NeuralMind PR runs a backend parity gate (evals/parity/run.py) that builds the reference fixture with both graphify and the built-in backend, runs the faithfulness eval and derives the token-reduction ratio on each, and fails the build if the built-in backend drifts outside tolerance of graphify (within 25% reduction, within 10 points faithfulness). If a backend change ever made retrieval meaningfully worse, CI catches it before it ships.

Measure it on your own code in the same breath:

neuralmind benchmark .          # your actual reduction ratio + per-query tokens