Context Zero Engine

A local code-intelligence engine for AI agents. ContextZero indexes a repository into a PostgreSQL-backed code graph and serves structured, token-budgeted context — symbols, dependencies, effects, contracts, similar code, and blast radius — over MCP and HTTP. Everything runs on your machine; nothing leaves it.

Built by ClassEve. Licensed under Apache-2.0.

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The Problem

Coding agents and developer tools usually inspect source one file at a time. On a non-trivial codebase that means opening dozens of files, re-reading the same code across tasks, manually tracing transitive effects — and still missing contract assumptions or behaviorally similar code elsewhere in the repository.

ContextZero indexes the repository once and answers the same investigation with targeted queries: give me this symbol with its dependencies and contracts, what breaks if I change it, where else does this logic exist, which tests cover it. In recorded benchmark runs this cut the tokens an agent consumed by 63–92% depending on repository size (12.4x on VS Code, 12.9x across seven multi-language repos). See BENCHMARKS.md for full methodology, results, and honest caveats.

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What It Computes

Capability	Description
Context Capsules	Token-budgeted context packages: source, dependencies, contracts, and effects in one call, with a 5-level degradation ladder.
Blast Radius	5-dimensional impact analysis (structural, behavioral, contract, homolog, historical) with severity and confidence scoring.
Behavioral Profiling	Every function classified: pure / read_only / read_write / side_effecting, with transitive propagation through the call graph.
Effect Signatures	9 typed effects (reads, writes, opens, throws, calls_external, logs, emits, normalizes, acquires_lock) propagated transitively.
Contract Extraction	Input/output types, error contracts, security contracts, guard clauses, derived invariants — mined from the code itself.
Homolog Detection	Finds behaviorally equivalent code (not just textual clones) via 7-dimensional evidence scoring with contradiction flags.
Smart Context	One call: source + blast radius + callers + tests + contracts. Replaces 8+ separate lookups.
Dispatch Resolution	Class hierarchy, virtual call resolution, C3 linearization, field-sensitive points-to analysis.
Concept Families	Automatic grouping of related symbols with exemplar identification, outlier detection, and contradiction flagging.
Temporal Intelligence	Git-derived co-change analysis, temporal risk scoring, churn metrics.
Symbol Lineage	Cross-snapshot identity tracking through renames and refactors.
Transactional Editing	9-state change lifecycle with DB-backed rollback and 6-level progressive validation.
Semantic Search	Find code by what it does: TF-IDF + MinHash LSH similarity. No external APIs, no embedding service.
Uncertainty Tracking	12-source uncertainty model with per-symbol confidence scoring — the engine tells you what it is not sure about.

15 Languages

TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, C, C++, CUDA-flavored .cu/.cuh, Go, Rust, Java, C#, Ruby, Kotlin, Swift, PHP, Bash.

TypeScript and JavaScript use full AST analysis through the TypeScript Compiler API. Python uses LibCST with 60+ behavioral patterns. The remaining languages use tree-sitter with language-specific walkers.

How It Works

MCP-compatible client (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, ...)
    |
    | MCP protocol (stdio)            HTTP clients
    |                                     |
ContextZero MCP Bridge (61 tools)    REST API (60 routes)
    |                                     |
    +------------------+------------------+
    |
    +-- Ingestor (15 languages, delta ingestion)
    +-- 13 Analysis Engines
    |     Behavioral | Contract | Deep Contract | Blast Radius
    |     Effect | Dispatch | Concept Families | Temporal
    |     Symbol Lineage | Runtime Evidence | Uncertainty
    |     Structural Graph | Capsule Compiler
    +-- Semantic Engine (TF-IDF, MinHash LSH, cosine similarity)
    +-- Homolog Engine (7-dimensional scoring)
    +-- Transactional Editor (sandboxed validation, rollback)
    +-- Service Layer (transport-agnostic services)
    +-- Database Driver (circuit breaker, batch loader, advisory locks)
    |
PostgreSQL 16 (all data local, nothing leaves your machine)

The scg_ prefix on tools and environment variables comes from the engine's internal name for its data model — the structural code graph.

Deep dives: ARCHITECTURE.md (subsystems and tool registry) and TECHNICAL_DESIGN.md (data structures, algorithms, engine internals).

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Install

Prerequisites

• Node.js 20+ (22 recommended)
• PostgreSQL 14+ (16 recommended) with the pg_trgm extension
• Python 3 with libcst (optional — only for Python source analysis)

Bootstrap (recommended)

git clone https://github.com/classeve-public/context-zero-engine.git context-zero-engine
cd context-zero-engine

Windows:

powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\scripts\bootstrap.ps1 -Client claude

macOS / Linux:

scripts/bootstrap.sh --client claude

The bootstrap installs dependencies, creates .env, builds, runs database migrations, runs diagnostics (npm run doctor), and optionally writes the MCP config for your client (claude, codex, cursor, or all).

Manual install

npm install

createdb scg_v2
psql -d scg_v2 -c "CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS pg_trgm;"

cp .env.example .env    # set DB_USER / DB_PASSWORD / SCG_ALLOWED_BASE_PATHS

npm run build
npm run db:migrate
npm run doctor          # verifies node, database, python, env

Full options, client config paths, and troubleshooting: docs/INSTALL.md and docs/OPERATIONS.md.

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Quickstart

1. Wire it into an MCP client

The bundled installer writes the config (with a timestamped backup of the existing file) for Claude Desktop, Codex, or Cursor:

npm run mcp:install -- --client claude

Or generate config snippets without touching client files (npm run mcp:config), or register manually — for example with the Claude Code CLI:

claude mcp add contextzero -s user \
  -e CONTEXTZERO_ENV_FILE=/absolute/path/to/context-zero-engine/.env \
  -- node /absolute/path/to/context-zero-engine/dist/mcp-bridge/index.js

Any MCP client that speaks stdio works: the server is node dist/mcp-bridge/index.js with the DB_*/SCG_* environment (or a single CONTEXTZERO_ENV_FILE pointing at your .env).

2. Index a repository

From the MCP client, call:

scg_health_check                      → should report status: healthy
scg_register_repo / scg_ingest_repo   → index a repo under SCG_ALLOWED_BASE_PATHS

Then start asking: scg_smart_context, scg_blast_radius, scg_compile_context_capsule, scg_find_homologs, scg_semantic_search, ...

Three native tools (scg_native_codebase_overview, scg_native_symbol_search, scg_native_search_code) work immediately without a database — they analyze the filesystem directly.

3. Or run it as an HTTP server

npm run build
npm start          # HTTP server on port 3100

curl http://localhost:3100/health
curl -X POST http://localhost:3100/scg_codebase_overview \
  -H "X-API-Key: <your key>" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"repo_id": "..."}'

60 routes (7 GET + 53 POST) mirror the MCP tool surface plus health, readiness, Prometheus metrics, cache, and admin endpoints. All POST routes require API-key authentication (X-API-Key or Authorization: Bearer).

Docker (self-hosted server + bundled PostgreSQL)

cp .env.docker.example .env
# Set DB_PASSWORD and SCG_API_KEYS to strong secrets.
docker compose up -d

When registering repositories from Docker, use paths under /repos — that is where SCG_REPOS_PATH is mounted inside the container.

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MCP Tool Surface (61 tools)

Category	Count	Examples
Core	8	scg_health_check, scg_ingest_repo, scg_incremental_index, scg_codebase_overview
Symbol Intelligence	8	scg_resolve_symbol, scg_read_source, scg_semantic_search, scg_get_tests
Behavioral & Contract	8	scg_get_behavioral_profile, scg_get_invariants, scg_get_effect_signature
Impact Analysis	8	scg_blast_radius, scg_compile_context_capsule, scg_smart_context, scg_find_homologs
Change Planning	4	scg_plan_change, scg_prepare_change, scg_apply_propagation
Code Graph	8	scg_get_class_hierarchy, scg_get_symbol_lineage, scg_get_co_change_partners
Transactional Editing	6	scg_create_change_transaction, scg_validate_change, scg_rollback_change
Data Management	3	scg_list_snapshots, scg_batch_embed, scg_ingest_runtime_trace
Native Workspace (no DB)	3	scg_native_codebase_overview, scg_native_symbol_search, scg_native_search_code
Admin	5	scg_admin_run_retention, scg_admin_db_stats, scg_admin_system_info

The complete registry is in ARCHITECTURE.md.

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Security

• Local by design — no telemetry, no external APIs; analysis and storage stay on your machine
• SQL injection protection — parameterized queries plus table/column allowlists for dynamic queries
• 5-layer path traversal protection — null bytes, URL encoding, backslash handling, symlink escape checks, base-path boundary enforcement
• Fail-closed authentication — timing-safe comparison, 32-character minimum keys, per-IP brute-force lockout with exponential backoff
• Sandboxed validation — resource limits, process groups, SIGKILL escalation, environment sanitization
• Hardened HTTP surface — per-route rate limits and body-size limits, input validation on every route, sanitized error responses (no stack traces, paths, or SQL)

See SECURITY.md for the deployment hardening checklist and how to report a vulnerability.

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Benchmarks

Benchmark	Scale	Token reduction (exact-symbol baseline)
Engine self-ingest	105 files / 7,753 symbols	2.71x (63.1% savings)
VS Code	10,386 files / 125,777 symbol versions	12.44x (91.96% savings)
7 multi-language repos	Django, Prometheus, Tokio, Commons Lang, Serilog, OkHttp, Alamofire	12.86x (92.2% savings)

Methodology, per-repo tables, reproduction scripts, and the cases where the gain is small: BENCHMARKS.md.

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Testing

npm test              # full unit suite (40 suites, 1,400+ tests)
npm run test:db       # opt-in integration test against a real PostgreSQL
npm run test:ci       # with coverage
npm run typecheck     # TypeScript strict mode
npm run lint

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Documentation

Document	Description
docs/INSTALL.md	Install paths, MCP client configuration, diagnostics
docs/OPERATIONS.md	Day-to-day operation, indexing, network server mode
ARCHITECTURE.md	System architecture, subsystems, tool registry
TECHNICAL_DESIGN.md	Data structures, algorithms, engine internals
BENCHMARKS.md	Benchmark methodology and results
SECURITY.md	Hardening checklist and vulnerability reporting

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About

Built and maintained by ClassEve — engineering for AI agents and developer tooling. Project page: classeve.com/public/context-zero-engine.

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE. Copyright 2026 ClassEve.