8 posts carrying this tag.
The objection to compiling a codebase into a verifiable IR is always cost. It sounds like Opus pricing across every file. It isn't. At open-source-model rates it runs about $13.30 per 1,000 files, you pay it once, and per-file diffing means you only ever re-pay for what changed. Here is the real economics of the verifiable context layer, and why the expensive thing is not building the IR but living without one.
Everyone building code intelligence ends up at a graph, and then they start calling it a context graph because plain code graph stopped feeling like enough. But adding the word context does not add meaning. A graph of symbols and a graph of meaning are different objects. Here is the line between them, and why crossing it requires a verifiable code IR, not more edges.
Context graph is a term people understand and reach for. But most things called a context graph are one-way extractions you can read and never check anything against. The version worth wanting is the one you can verify code against, and that single requirement is what separates an index from a verifiable code IR. Here is what verification demands, and why it is the only honest test of a context graph.
GraphRAG for codebases is a genuine step up from vector search. It follows real call edges instead of guessing at similarity, and it wins on architectural questions. But it breaks in three predictable places: cross-repo links that aren't call edges, the why behind the code, and anything that needs intent you can check changes against. Here is a clear-eyed map of what graph RAG for codebases solves, where it stops, and the verifiable context layer that sits above it.
Your team uses Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and Windsurf, and each one rebuilds an understanding of your codebase from scratch and shares nothing with the others. MCP is the standard that lets you stop doing that. Compile your repos once into a verifiable IR and serve it to every tool over one MCP endpoint. Here is why the context layer belongs outside the tool, and what changes when it does.
A technical note on what 'verifiable' actually means in a verifiable code IR. Not a machine that rebuilds your code from a document, but a derived contract that every change gets checked against. Here is what a single verification check consists of, why round-trip is a signal and never a promise, and the honest boundary of what it can and cannot catch.
Semantic code search keeps getting better at finding the right code, and it keeps disappointing teams who expected better answers from their AI tools. The reason is that those are two different problems. Finding code is retrieval. Understanding code is representation. Better retrieval over a poor representation has a ceiling, and here is why a verifiable code IR raises it.
Specs and code drift apart the day after you write the PRD, because they are two separate documents that nobody keeps in sync. A verifiable context layer derives the spec a codebase actually implements and then continuously checks the code against it. Here is how spec-driven development works on a brownfield codebase, and why it needs a verifiable code IR that checks code against intent.
