ccc - Semantic Code Search & Indexing

ccc is the CLI for CocoIndex Code, providing semantic search over the current codebase and index management.

Ownership

The agent owns the ccc lifecycle for the current project — initialization, indexing, and searching. Do not ask the user to perform these steps; handle them automatically.

• Initialization: If ccc search or ccc index fails with an initialization error (e.g., "Not in an initialized project directory"), run ccc init from the project root directory, then ccc index to build the index, then retry the original command.
• Index freshness: Keep the index up to date by running ccc index (or ccc search --refresh) when the index may be stale — e.g., at the start of a session, or after making significant code changes (new files, refactors, renamed modules). There is no need to re-index between consecutive searches if no code was changed in between.
• Installation: If ccc itself is not found (command not found), refer to [management.md](references/management.md) for installation instructions and inform the user.

Searching the Codebase

To perform a semantic search:

ccc search <query terms>

The query should describe the concept, functionality, or behavior to find, not exact code syntax. For example:

ccc search database connection pooling
ccc search user authentication flow
ccc search error handling retry logic

Filtering Results

• By language (--lang, repeatable): restrict results to specific languages.

``bash ccc search --lang python --lang markdown database schema ``

• By path (--path): restrict results to a glob pattern relative to project root. If omitted, defaults to the current working directory (only results under that subdirectory are returned).

``bash ccc search --path 'src/api/*' request validation ``

Pagination

Results default to the first page. To retrieve additional results:

ccc search --offset 5 --limit 5 database schema

If all returned results look relevant, use --offset to fetch the next page — there are likely more useful matches beyond the first page.

Working with Search Results

Search results include file paths and line ranges. To explore a result in more detail:

• Use the editor's built-in file reading capabilities (e.g., the Read tool) to load the matched file and read lines around the returned range for full context.
• When working in a terminal without a file-reading tool, use sed -n '<start>,<end>p' <file> to extract a specific line range.

Settings

To view or edit embedding model configuration, include/exclude patterns, or language overrides, see [settings.md](references/settings.md).

Management & Troubleshooting

For installation, initialization, daemon management, troubleshooting, and cleanup commands, see [management.md](references/management.md).