Context Engine

A Note to Our Community

We owe you an honest explanation.

Context Engine was originally open source. We built it in the open because we believed in the community and wanted developers everywhere to benefit from better code search.

Unfortunately, we've seen our work consistently monetized and cloned by others without attribution — entire products built on top of our code and sold commercially. After careful consideration, we've made the difficult decision to remove the source code from this repository.

We're sorry. We know this is frustrating, especially for those who contributed, starred, or relied on the public codebase. This wasn't the outcome we wanted, and we take full responsibility for not protecting the project sooner.

What's still here:

• AI agent skills for all major coding assistants (see below)
• The Context Engine marketing site (context-engine.ai)
• License, legal notices, and attribution files

What's available through the platform:

• Full hosted service at context-engine.ai
• VS Code extension on the marketplace
• ctx-mcp-bridge on npm

We remain committed to building the best code intelligence tools for developers. If you have questions, reach out at john@context-engine.ai.

Install Skills

Context Engine ships AI agent skills that teach your coding assistant how to use 30+ MCP tools for semantic search, symbol graph navigation, memory, and more.

Claude Code / Claude Desktop

The skill is auto-loaded when you connect Context Engine as an MCP server. No manual installation needed.

If you want to add the rules file manually:

# Copy the skill to your project
cp -r skills/context-engine/ your-project/.claude/

# Or reference GEMINI.md / .cursorrules directly — they contain the same rules

Cursor

Context Engine rules are included in .cursorrules at the root of your workspace. Cursor picks this up automatically when the file is present.

# Copy to your project root
cp .cursorrules your-project/.cursorrules

Windsurf / Codex

# Codex skills
cp -r .codex/skills/ your-project/.codex/skills/

# Or use the generic skill file
cp skills/context-engine/SKILL.md your-project/.context-engine-skill.md

Augment Code

cp -r .augment/ your-project/.augment/

Gemini

cp GEMINI.md your-project/GEMINI.md

Any Other Assistant

The core skill file works with any AI assistant that supports custom instructions:

cp skills/context-engine/SKILL.md your-project/

Then tell your assistant: "Read SKILL.md for instructions on using Context Engine MCP tools."

What Do the Skills Do?

The skills teach your AI assistant to:

• Use search as the default tool — auto-routes queries to the best backend (semantic search, Q&A, symbol graph, tests, config)
• Navigate code with symbol_graph — find callers, callees, definitions, importers, subclasses
• Run batch queries — batch_search, batch_symbol_graph, batch_graph_query for 75%+ token savings
• Store and recall knowledge — memory_store and memory_find for persistent context across sessions
• Trace cross-repo flows — cross_repo_search with boundary tracing for multi-repo codebases
• Find structural patterns — pattern_search for retry loops, error handling, singletons across languages
• Search git history — search_commits_for and change_history_for_path

See skills/context-engine/SKILL.md for the complete tool reference.

Getting Started

1. Sign up at context-engine.ai
2. Install the VS Code extension — search "Context Engine" in the marketplace
3. Upload your codebase — the extension handles indexing automatically
4. Start searching — your AI assistant now has access to all 30+ MCP tools

License

Context-Engine Source Available License 1.0

© 2025 Context Engine Inc. and John Donalson.