scalps

Development story

scalps is a novel solution to a common problem that was designed and built with Codex GPT‑5.6 (“Sol”) in approximately three days. It is a local C++ definition-search tool for a specific but costly developer and coding-agent failure: finding the right function in a large codebase when the user knows what it does, but not its exact name.

The work began after local search tools such as grepai and cocoindex-code failed to locate relevant C++ functions, including after attempts to improve source discoverability through refactoring. Rather than adding another general-purpose search layer, the question posed to Sol was:

If we designed specifically for this case, with C++ as the only concern, should we modify an existing tool or build something new? What retrieval approach should we use?

Sol proposed a new, definition-first architecture: use Clang to identify written C++ function and method definitions; store their names, signatures, comments, bodies, source ranges, and compiler-resolved relationships; retrieve candidates with literal, identifier, and field-aware lexical search; then rank them with deterministic structural evidence. The result deliberately searches complete definitions rather than arbitrary source chunks, and returns exact source locations and context.

Before implementation, Sol was asked to conduct Deep Research on comparable projects. Its conclusion was that the proposed architecture remained “unusually specific in the current ecosystem,” in an area where permissively licensed tools appeared particularly sparse.

Sol then created a staged roadmap. Development proceeded through roughly 54 Zed sessions: roadmap phases were divided into focused sessions, and each session into a sequence of reviewable commits. Codex wrote the implementation at medium reasoning effort, including the Clang extraction pipeline, versioned SQLite index, incremental and atomic index updates, explainable ranking, definition context, JSON output, packaging, tests, and documentation.

Each commit was independently reviewed with Grok 4.5. Review findings were returned to Sol for correction, then verified through the project test suite.

The human directed the product and made key decisions throughout. In particular, they proposed the definition-context feature and required both concise default output and detailed verbose output. The human also set the constraint that the tool should remain local, deterministic, explainable, and narrowly focused on C++ definitions rather than becoming another broad natural-language code search system.

Built With

• 5.6
• c++
• codex
• gpt
• sol
• zed