Quick Start

Try code intelligence instantly

After installing, you can use code intelligence on any Git repo immediately — no initialization needed:

cd your-project
git-kb code index
git-kb code callers your-function
git-kb code impact src/your-file.ts

That’s it. You have a call graph. See Code Intelligence for the full command reference.

Set up your agent harness

To let your AI agent use code intelligence (and the full knowledge engineering platform) automatically, initialize your harness:

git-kb init
git-kb init claude   # or: git-kb init codex

This creates the knowledge base and scaffolds your agent’s rules, skills, and MCP configuration so it knows how to use GitKB effectively.

Start building

Open Claude Code and ask a question:

“What’s the blast radius of changing the authenticate function?”

“Find all the dead code in src/api/ and tell me what’s safe to delete.”

“Let’s use GitKB to start a new project.”

The agent uses code intelligence tools automatically. With a full KB initialized, it also walks you through creating context documents for your project — what it does, who it’s for, what technical decisions you’ve made. From there, it guides you into task-based, pragmatic engineering: creating tasks with acceptance criteria, tracking progress, and building a knowledge base that compounds in value with every session.

What happens behind the scenes

Natural language and an agent with skills are enough to leverage all of GitKB’s capabilities — you can use it extensively before needing to master the CLI yourself. But understanding the commands helps you see what the agent is doing on your behalf.

Documents

Everything in GitKB is a document — Markdown with YAML frontmatter. Tasks, specs, incidents, architecture decisions, context documents. They have types, statuses, tags, and relationships to each other via [[wikilinks]].

# Create a document
git-kb create --type task --slug tasks/auth-refactor --title "Refactor auth module"

# View a document (tip: install glow for colorized output — see Installation)
git-kb show tasks/auth-refactor

# List all documents
git-kb list

# List tasks filtered by status
git-kb list --type task --status active

The workspace

The workspace (.kb/workspace/) is where documents are checked out for editing. Check out, edit the Markdown file, and commit your changes back:

git-kb checkout tasks/auth-refactor
# Edit .kb/workspace/tasks/auth-refactor.md
git-kb commit -m "Add acceptance criteria"

The board

View your tasks organized by status, priority, or tags:

git-kb board
git-kb board --group-by priority
git-kb board --sort-by updated --sort-direction desc

Search and graph

Find documents by content, and explore how they relate to each other:

git-kb search "authentication"
git-kb graph tasks/auth-refactor

Sync

Share your KB with your team by pushing to a remote. Pull only the documents you need:

git-kb push
git-kb pull 'context/*'

Next steps

• MCP Setup — Connect GitKB to Cursor, Cline, Windsurf, and other editors
• Documents — Learn about document types and frontmatter
• Code Intelligence — Index your source code for call graph analysis
• Configuration — Customize your GitKB setup