Quickstart

Five minutes from curl | sh to “Claude can ask the past how I solved this before.” Assumes the install is done and both ohara and ohara-mcp are on PATH.

1. Index a repo

Pick a real repo with some history (the demo is more compelling on something with a few hundred commits than on a fresh git init):

cd ~/code/some-real-repo
ohara index

The first run downloads the BGE-small embedding model (~80 MB, one-time) and then walks every commit, embedding diffs and extracting HEAD-snapshot symbols. On a small repo this finishes in seconds; on a QuestDB-class polyglot codebase it currently takes a while — see the v0.6 throughput RFC.

The index lives at $OHARA_HOME/<repo-id>/index.sqlite (defaults to ~/.ohara/). Nothing leaves your machine.

2. Install the post-commit hook

So the index stays fresh as you commit:

ohara init

This drops a managed block into .git/hooks/post-commit that runs ohara index --incremental after every commit. The hook is wrapped in fence comments (# >>> ohara managed >>> … # <<< ohara managed <<<), so re-running ohara init is idempotent and your existing hook content is preserved. The hook fails-closed if ohara isn’t on PATH — it never blocks a commit.

If you also want a CLAUDE.md stanza describing the tool:

ohara init --write-claude-md

See ohara init for the full flag set.

3. Run a query

Sanity-check the index from the CLI before wiring into Claude:

ohara query --query "retry with backoff" --k 3

The output is the same JSON envelope the MCP find_pattern tool returns. Each hit carries the commit SHA, message, file path, a truncated diff excerpt, similarity / recency / combined scores, and provenance.

4. Wire into Claude Code

Point Claude at ohara-mcp and you’re done — see Wiring into MCP clients for the claude_desktop_config.json snippet. Both find_pattern and explain_change become available to Claude in any session whose working directory matches an indexed repo.

What next?

• Learn what the MCP tools do: find_pattern, explain_change.
• Check on an index: ohara status.
• Understand what the index actually contains: Architecture overview.