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Why Roam is different

Roam helps you find your way around a repository before you change it. It builds a local map of functions, classes, imports, and the connections between them, then uses that map to answer questions like:

• Where does this feature start, and which files should I read?
• Who calls this function? What else could my change affect?
• Which tests are connected to this code?
• What did we actually check before calling this change ready?

Use it yourself in the terminal, or let your coding agent query it through the CLI or MCP (a standard way for assistants to use tools). You do not need to learn hundreds of commands: start with the five below.

Roam complements your editor, text search, tests, and code review. Its useful difference is the connections: a search finds a name; Roam helps you follow where that name is defined and used. Those connections come from static analysis, so they can be incomplete. A suggested test list is not test coverage, and a good health score is not permission to merge.

Local analysis needs no account or API key. It does not automatically upload your code, index, findings, or telemetry. Installation and the first parser download need network access; optional online features have explicit triggers. See what can contact the network before using Roam in a restricted environment.

For teams that need a review record, Roam can save what changed, which checks ran, and why a gate passed or stopped. Signed records can reveal later changes to the evidence; they cannot prove that every relevant check was captured. Read what verification evidence does and does not prove.

Install + first four commands

Start in a Git repository you want to explore:

pip install "roam-code[mcp]"          # 1. install the CLI and optional agent-tool server
cd /path/to/your/repo
roam init                            # 2. build the local index and project configuration
roam health                          # 3. see a summary of code structure and findings
roam preflight <symbol>              # 4. check a function or class before changing it

Python 3.10+. pipx install roam-code and uv tool install roam-code work too. Drop [mcp] for CLI-only. See docs/fresh-install-smoke.md for a verbatim transcript of these four commands against a clean venv.

Replace <symbol> with a function or class from your project. To find one, run roam search <name>. The first index takes longer than later refreshes; timing depends on repository size and your machine. Use roam index instead of init if you only want the index, without creating project configuration.

Here is a recorded example from Roam's own codebase. open_db is used widely, so the report calls out the size of the change before you make it. The counts below are a snapshot, not live measurements of your checkout:

$ roam preflight open_db
VERDICT: Significant risk — CRITICAL, 17922 symbols in blast radius

Pre-flight check for `open_db (src/roam/db/connection.py:1076)`:

  Blast radius:     17922 symbols in 1732 files              [CRITICAL]
  Affected tests:   681 direct, 14126 transitive             [OK]
  Complexity:       cc=5, nest=2                             [LOW]
  Coupling:         2 files often change together            [MEDIUM]
  Conventions:      no violations                            [OK]
  Fitness:          target passes; 1 rule(s) fail on sibling symbols [OK]

  Overall risk: CRITICAL
  Risk driver:  blast radius (17922 symbols in 1732 files, CRITICAL)

“Blast radius” means code that could be affected through the indexed connections; it does not mean all of those functions will break.

pipx install roam-code                                   # isolated environment (recommended)
uv tool install roam-code                                # uv-managed tool
pip install git+https://github.com/Cranot/roam-code.git  # from source

# Docker (local build; CLI + MCP dependencies)
docker build -t roam-code .
docker run --rm --user "$(id -u):$(id -g)" -e HOME=/tmp -v "$PWD:/workspace" roam-code index
docker run --rm --user "$(id -u):$(id -g)" -e HOME=/tmp -v "$PWD:/workspace" roam-code health

Context for your agent

When you ask an agent “who calls handleSave?”, it often starts by searching and opening files. Roam's task compiler can do some of that preparation locally and attach relevant context to the prompt: callers with line numbers, recent changes, or the source around a reported bug. It makes no model calls of its own. Your agent still needs to assess the context and do the work.

For Claude Code, install the hooks once from the project directory:

pip install "roam-code[mcp]"
cd your-repo && roam init
roam hooks claude --write     # compile-before + verify-after, wired into Claude Code

Then use claude exactly as you always do. Undo anytime with roam hooks claude --uninstall --write. Compile-time context injection is fail-open. After an edited turn, the Stop gate is deliberately fail-closed: findings, malformed output, an unavailable check, or incomplete evidence must be resolved before Claude reports completion. No-edit Q&A turns fast-exit.

Historical tests found fewer agent turns and lower costs for some tasks, with regressions on others. These are dated experiments, not a promise about your model or repository. The full results and limitations remain below.

For scripts and CI: roam compile "<task>" --artifact auto.

Prefer a dedicated product CLI? compile-code wraps the same context-and-verification loop and installs roam-code as a dependency. See that repository for installation and its supported workflow.

Check the work after an edit

roam verify --auto chooses checks for the files that changed. Depending on the change, these include:

• naming — against the codebase's own per-language convention (sampled from production code only: test/vendored/generated files neither vote nor get flagged, framework lifecycle names like setUp are never touched)
• imports — check that imports resolve to the index, the stdlib, or a declared dependency. A module path that resolves to nothing fails as a likely hallucination; near-miss names get fuzzy did-you-mean candidates
• error handling / syntax / complexity / cycles / duplicates — scoped structural review with honest disclosure when any sub-check could not run
• secrets — a leak gate over every touched file: credential shapes (cloud keys, tokens, PEM blocks) fail the check, and an optional repo-local .roam-leak-patterns.py catalogue catches the strings your project must never publish
• patterns (advisory, --deep) — the algorithm/idiom catalog scoped to the diff: N+1 query shapes, loop-invariant calls, string-concat loops, each with the better approach and a fix sketch

The fix loop. Wired via roam hooks claude --write, findings come back to the agent as an actionable list — fix, then re-verify — and the gate runs again on each correction (Claude bounds consecutive continuations). A human-reviewed exception can be recorded in .roam-suppressions.yml, keyed by symbol so it survives refactors that shift line numbers; automatic hook corrections cannot alter suppressions, policy, baselines, or verification scope. The compile hook remains fail-open. The edited-turn Stop gate is quiet only on a complete PASS and blocks when verification is unavailable, malformed, incomplete, or reports non-advisory findings.

To focus on your current change or manage findings already in the project:

roam verify --auto                      # changed files, auto-selected checks
roam verify --diff-only                 # only lines you changed vs HEAD
roam verify --changed-lines cli.py:40-90   # exact ranges (agent harnesses)
roam verify --baseline-write            # snapshot current findings as accepted debt
roam verify --new-only                  # then: only NEW findings fail
roam verify --report --severity fail    # whole-repo ranked punch-list (non-gating)
roam verify --off / --on               # pause / resume the loop repo-wide

The commands that run beside it in the same post-edit stance:

The test suite includes deliberately broken examples, clean examples that should not be flagged, and checks that saved exceptions survive refactoring. Those tests help prevent regressions; they do not measure every detector's accuracy on unfamiliar repositories. Detector evidence and limitations explains where findings still need careful review.

What's New

v14.0.4 (2026-09-05) — the proof schema now travels with your installation. The JSON Schema used to check proof-bundle structure is included in both package formats, not just the source checkout. Installed-package tests now exercise its public loader, and a new packaging guard catches undeclared data files. Full notes: CHANGELOG.md.

v14.0.3 (2026-09-05) — clearer guidance and more trustworthy check results. Saved proof files keep their review results when read back. Malformed evidence and failed collection cannot turn into a passing result. Benchmark reports keep missing measurements unknown and count failed attempts. The README and verification guide now explain how to get useful answers—and where tests and human review still matter. Full notes: CHANGELOG.md.

v14.0.2 (2026-09-05) — controlled cold starts and more precise loop advice. Keep index control files with a redirected database, opt out of implicit indexing, and receive parseable JSON even on cold starts. Workspace import checks recognize shared development tools without hiding undeclared sibling dependencies. Loop advice accounts for collection mutation, positional lookups, clocks and randomness; complexity-hint matching avoids unrelated AST work. The pinned wheel build tool also receives its path-traversal fix. Full notes: CHANGELOG.md.

v14.0.1 (2026-09-05) — more precise findings and clearer verification. Browser and TypeScript checks distinguish lifecycle calls from database operations, resolve NodeNext source extensions, and show stronger evidence for algorithm advice. Incomplete searches require review instead of authorizing deletion. MCP compatibility is tested against the supported SDK generation, retrieval benchmarks name their dependency profiles, and release checks enforce their stated worker budget. Official container publication remains on hold pending image-wide security review. Full notes: CHANGELOG.md.

Full release notes in CHANGELOG.md.

Best for

• Getting oriented — find entry points, important modules, and code worth reading first.
• Working with a coding agent — give it focused context instead of asking it to rediscover everything.
• Planning a refactor — inspect callers, dependencies, and related tests before editing.
• Reviewing changes — collect findings and record which checks actually ran.
• Maintaining a growing project — spot dependency cycles, frequently changed code, and repeated work.
• Investigating security or performance concerns — use findings as leads, then verify them with the right tests and specialist tools.

When NOT to use Roam

• Real-time type checking — use an LSP (pyright, gopls, tsserver). Roam is static and offline.
• Small scripts (<10 files) — read the files directly.
• Pure text search — ripgrep is faster for raw string matching.

What's measured vs advisory

Roam's surfaces differ in how rigorously they've been validated — know which is which before you gate on them:

• Repair-intent retrieval (roam retrieve --repair-intent <patch>) — the one surface with a preregistered, held-out, stranger-repo result. Give it the diff of a fix you just made and it reranks toward the other files that need the same repair, rather than the files that merely look similar. Measured on 576 real multi-site fixes from 12 third-party repos (rich, aiohttp, httpx, fastapi, click, flask, jinja, werkzeug, pydantic, pytest, attrs, urllib3), frozen before scoring and shipped in-repo:

  vs plain lexical search	delta	95% CI (bootstrap, n=2000)
  nDCG@10	+0.064 (0.605 vs 0.541)	[+0.032, +0.097]
  P@3	+0.041	[+0.024, +0.058]
  MRR	+0.059	[+0.026, +0.092]
  recall@10	+0.034	[−0.002, +0.070] — not significant

  That clears the preregistered bar (nDCG@10 ≥ +0.05 with a CI excluding zero) and it survived an adversarial falsifier. Read it for what it is: a real but modest improvement over lexical search on this task — not a step change. The one striking result underneath: our graph-sibling candidate pool on its own scores 0.258, far worse than lexical's 0.541. It only beats lexical once repair-intent reranking is applied. The reranking is not polish on a good pool — it is the reason the pool is usable at all.

  Scope honestly: it needs a real patch as input, and it finds repair siblings. It is not a general-purpose search improvement, and recall is not measurably better. This is the only roam surface we would put in front of your codebase without hedging.

• Reachability triage (roam vuln-reach, roam sbom) — the most conservatively designed surface: reachability is derived only from import evidence (import sites and import edges, with file:line), never from symbol-name coincidence, so a CVE with no import evidence reports as unknown rather than reachable. Strong precision by construction; real-CVE recall on unfamiliar repos is still being measured — use it as a high-precision triage signal, and treat "unknown" as unverified rather than safe.

• Taint packs (roam taint) — validated on synthetic fixtures; real-code recall on arbitrary repositories is low/unmeasured. Treat findings as leads to investigate, not a completeness guarantee; the --ci gate is opt-in.

• Idiom & long-tail detectors (roam auth-gaps, roam missing-index, roam over-fetch, roam n1, framework idioms) — advisory. Blind precision on unfamiliar repos is not yet measured for all of them, and framework idiom detectors that measured low on stranger repos are opt-in (not on the default surface). Review each finding; don't gate CI on these alone.

Core commands

Start with these five commands. Use understand, context, retrieve, preflight, and critique for everyday exploration and change review. You can discover the rest as you need them: 287 commands (280 canonical + 7 aliases) organised into 7 categories. An alias is another name for the same command; you do not need to memorize them. Explore the remaining 282 commands when you need more detail.

The full surface spans 7 categories — Getting Started, Daily Workflow, Codebase Health, Architecture, Exploration, Reports & CI, and Refactoring. Run roam --help for the 5-verb core, roam --help-all for every command name, and roam surface --json for the machine-readable inventory. Every command accepts roam --json <cmd> for structured output and roam --sarif <cmd> for CI integration (SARIF 2.1.0, honoured by 39 commands).

A few representative commands beyond the core five:

• Health & architecture: roam health (0-100 score), roam weather (churn × complexity hotspots), roam smells (24 deterministic detectors), roam algo (34-task anti-pattern catalog), roam clusters / roam layers / roam cycles.
• Change safety: roam impact <symbol> (blast radius), roam diff (uncommitted-change blast radius), roam pr-risk (0-100 PR risk), roam diagnose <symbol> (root-cause ranking).
• Backend quality: roam n1 (N+1 queries), roam auth-gaps, roam missing-index, roam over-fetch, roam taint (graph-reach taint, 11 rule packs).
• Index-aware search: roam search <pattern>, roam grep <pattern> -C 5 (grep + bounded code packets + reachability + PageRank), roam grep <pattern> --whole-symbol (deduplicated enclosing functions/classes), roam uses <name> (graph-precise references, no string-literal false positives).
• Multi-agent: roam orchestrate --agents 3 (conflict-aware partitioning), roam fleet plan, roam lease (parallel-agent coordination).

Walkthrough

$ roam understand                       # briefing: languages, stack, layers/clusters, health, key abstractions, entry points
$ roam file src/flask/app.py            # file skeleton: definitions + signatures + health
$ roam deps src/flask/app.py            # what imports this file
$ roam weather                          # hotspots ranked by churn × complexity
$ roam health                           # composite 0-100 + god components / cycles / layer violations
$ roam context Flask                    # AI-ready context: files to read with line ranges
$ roam preflight Flask                  # pre-change gate: blast radius + tests + complexity + fitness
$ roam split src/flask/app.py           # internal symbol groups + extraction suggestions
$ roam why Flask url_for Blueprint      # role classification (Hub/Bridge/Core) + reach + risk
$ roam health --gate                    # CI quality gate (exit 5 on failure)

Integration with AI coding tools

Roam is designed to be called by coding agents. Instead of repeatedly grepping and reading files, the agent runs one roam command and gets a verdict-first envelope. roam preflight (above) replaces grep+read+test-impact+complexity+fitness in one ~3KB call; roam health rolls the whole codebase into one score:

$ roam health
VERDICT: Fair codebase (77/100) — 65 critical, 0 warnings, focus: god_components

Health Score: 77/100  |  Tangle: 0.0% (0/44056 symbols in cycles)
Propagation Cost: 6.0%  |  Algebraic Connectivity: 0.0146

Health: 65 issues — 65 CRITICAL, 37 INFO
  (0 actionable cycles, 37 local/test cycles ignored, 50 god components
   (19 actionable, 31 expected utilities), 15 bottlenecks (2 actionable))
  Breakdown: cycles [0 issues], god [50 CRITICAL], bottlenecks [15 CRITICAL], layers [0 issues]

Top CRITICAL issues (run `roam --detail health` for the full breakdown):
  god component: result (prop, degree=2198)
  god component: path (prop, degree=677)

The verdict line works alone — an agent that reads nothing else still knows where to look. Pipe --json for the structured envelope your agent consumes.

Fastest setup (Claude Code): wire the compile/verify loop in one command — no config files, no MCP setup, no rules to write:

roam hooks claude --write           # compile-before + verify-after hooks; --uninstall to undo

For other agents (or alongside the hooks), point them at Roam via instructions in their config file:

roam describe --write               # auto-detects CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, .cursor/rules, etc.
roam describe --agent-prompt        # compact ~500-token prompt — copy-paste into an existing config
roam minimap --update               # inject/refresh an annotated codebase minimap (won't touch other content)

This teaches the agent which command fits each situation: roam preflight before changes, roam context for files to read, roam diagnose for debugging.

MCP Server

Roam includes a Model Context Protocol server for direct integration with MCP-aware tools. See protocol compatibility, the agent CLI guide, and container installation and release evidence for supported versions and bounded examples.

pip install "roam-code[mcp]"
roam mcp

Default preset: core (17 tools: 16 core + roam_expand_toolset meta-tool).

246 MCP tools span 8 selectable presets (core, review, refactor, debug, architecture, compliance, compile-curated, full); core stays narrow to keep the prompt tight. Most tools are read-only index queries; side-effect tools are explicitly annotated. Set ROAM_MCP_PRESET=full roam mcp for the complete toolset.

When a tool cannot finish. MCP tools report missing prerequisites and incomplete work in a structured response, with a status, explanation, and next step. Consumers should check partial_success and errors, not just whether the tool returned a response.

MCP runtime security. Three controls run at the wrapper boundary inside the server, protecting every client even with no gateway present: egress secret-redaction, mode-gated policy_decision enforcement (opt-in shadow-mode via ROAM_MODE_DRY_RUN), and HMAC-linked decision receipts bound into the signed run ledger. Mixed query/write tools are classified per invocation, so a read-only form stays available while an explicit persist/write flag raises the required mode and receipt effects. Gateway integrators: see dev/MCP-SECURITY-POSTURE.md.

See Using Roam via MCP for the first-run flow and canonical agent sequence.

Core preset tools: roam_alerts, roam_ask, roam_batch_search, roam_coupling, roam_dead_code, roam_deps, roam_diagnose_issue, roam_fetch_handle, roam_file_info, roam_grep, roam_metrics, roam_prepare_change, roam_search_symbol, roam_taint, roam_understand, roam_uses.

roam_ask (and roam ask on the CLI) is a natural-language codebase question dispatcher — 'is it safe to delete X?', 'where does login validate?', 'who owns module Y?' — that routes intent to one recipe in the graph-aware 31-recipe registry, replacing a Grep+Read round trip with one call.

The full 246-tool table with descriptions lives in docs/mcp-tools.md.

{ "mcpServers": { "roam-code": { "command": "roam", "args": ["mcp"] } } }

Go deeper

Pick the path that matches your role:

• 5-min demo (CTO/CISO/dev-tools-lead): The Canonical Demo — install → health → preflight → critique → signed ChangeEvidence packet, five commands, no laptop egress.
• Developer tutorial (15 min): Getting Started — install, index, query, ship.
• Agent integration: roam mcp-setup claude-code --write (or cursor, windsurf, vscode, gemini-cli, codex-cli) — then Using Roam via MCP for the cold-start envelope and canonical agent loop.
• Full surface: Command Reference — every command, flag, and JSON envelope.
• Architecture: How it fits together — graph, findings registry, run ledger, evidence compiler.

CI/CD integration

All you need is Python 3.10+ and pip install roam-code.

# .github/workflows/roam.yml
name: Roam Analysis
on: [pull_request]

jobs:
  roam:
    runs-on: ubuntu-24.04
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@34e114876b0b11c390a56381ad16ebd13914f8d5 # v4.3.1
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
          persist-credentials: false
      # For production, replace the tag with the reviewed 40-character SHA it
      # points at — a release tag is readable but remains movable.
      - uses: Cranot/[email protected]
        with:
          version: '14.0.4'
          commands: health
          gate: "score>=70"
          sarif: 'true'
          comment: 'true'

Generate this workflow explicitly with roam init --with-ci=github or roam ci-setup --platform github --write; plain roam init does not modify CI configuration. The Action accepts commands, gate (quality-gate expression, exit 5 on failure), sarif (upload to GitHub Code Scanning), comment (sticky PR comment), cache, and changed-only (incremental mode).

SARIF output. 39 commands honour the global --sarif flag (health, complexity, dead, smells, clones, vulns, taint, secrets, n1, …). Minimal upload:

- run: roam --sarif health > roam-health.sarif
- uses: github/codeql-action/upload-sarif@03e4368ac7daa2bd82b3e85262f3bf87ee112f57 # v3.36.0
  with:
    sarif_file: roam-health.sarif

For GitLab / Jenkins / Azure / Bitbucket templates, severity gates, and upload guardrails, see docs/ci-integration.md.

Roam Guard for PRs

roam guard-pr collects the current change's review record in one command: what changed, which checks were required, which ran, and why the result is pass, pass_with_warnings, needs_review, or blocked. The saved JSON record is called an Agent Change Proof Bundle v1. It records available evidence; it does not independently authenticate every supplied claim.

# Local — show the markdown verdict for your current branch's pr-bundle.
roam guard-pr --format markdown

# CI — one line; --ci is shorthand for --strict + --init-if-missing + markdown.
roam guard-pr --ci --output guard.md

# CI — post to GitHub Check Runs (works with the default GITHUB_TOKEN).
roam guard-pr --post-check --gh-repo $REPO --gh-sha $SHA

Example reviewer markdown:

## 🛑 Roam Guard verdict: `blocked`

> **0** of **4** required checks ran. **4** missing. Risk: `low`.

### Verdict reasons
- `required_checks_not_run` (×4) — `because=config_file_changed`
  - `lint.make.lint` (detail=['.mcp.json'])
  - `test.make.test` (detail=['.mcp.json'])

### Verification checks
| Status | Command | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 🛑 missing | `lint.make.lint` | config_file_changed |
| 🛑 missing | `test.make.test` | config_file_changed |

Verdict → CI exit + GitHub conclusion map. Exit codes are only emitted under --strict (which --ci implies); without it guard-pr always exits 0 and the verdict is reporting-only, so a CI gate must pass --ci or --strict:

A reporting-only run never passes silently. When the verdict would have gated (needs_review / blocked) but no --strict/--ci was given, guard-pr writes a loud banner to stderr naming the flag and the exit code it suppressed, and the --json envelope carries the same fact in summary.gate_enforced, summary.gate_suppressed and summary.verdict_exit_code. Check gate_suppressed, not exit_code, if you need to tell "verdict was clean" from "verdict was blocking but this run wasn't gating" — exit_code is 0 in both cases.

…view the full README on GitHub.