Phrasing Picks the Recipe

Canopy has one tool and one input: the question. There are no parameters to tune and no tool to choose — the router reads your phrasing and selects the recipe. That makes phrasing the only lever, and it follows two rules.

Rule 1 — name the entity type. Say “the function parseConfig”, “the file src/auth/session.ts”, “the struct Router”. The type word tells the router which recipe class you want.

Rule 2 — backtick paths, directories, and symbols. The router uses backticks to locate entities exactly. `src/lib.rs` is an anchor; “the lib file” is a guess.

Routing itself is deterministic — no LLM, no network, 360/360 on the router’s labelled corpus. A question that follows both rules locks onto a structural recipe. A question that follows neither falls through to the concept fallback, a semantic search over the chunk index. It still answers, but it is the weakest recipe: ranked prose instead of a structural fact.

Good and weak phrasing, per shape

Find and read code

Shape	Ask	Weak
Locate	where is the function `processPayment` defined?	`find processPayment`
Extract	show `processPayment` in `src/billing/charge.ts`	`print the payment code`
Explain a file	what does `src/auth/session.ts` do?	`explain the session stuff`
Public surface	public surface of `src/api/client.ts`	`what does the API expose?`
Filtered symbols	list functions defined in `src/net/`	`what functions handle networking?`

The weak forms drop the type word, the backticks, or both — so the router has no anchor and falls back to semantic search.

Trace structure

Shape	Ask	Weak
Dependents / blast radius	what depends on `src/lib/config.ts`? · what calls `parseConfig`?	`is config used a lot?`
Imports	what does `src/server/router.ts` import?	`what does the router pull in?`
Wiring / dead code	is `src/utils/legacy.ts` reachable?	`do we still use legacy utils?`
Import cycles	`are there import cycles?`	`is the dependency structure clean?`

Structure questions are graph queries. Phrased well, the answer is complete by construction — every edge in the index, not whatever a text search happened to hit.

History and safety

Shape	Ask	Weak
Ownership	who last changed `src/billing/invoice.ts`?	`who knows the billing code?`
Test coverage	what tests cover `src/billing/`?	`is billing tested?`
Pre-edit dossier	what should I know before editing `src/core/scheduler.ts`?	`is it safe to touch the scheduler?`

Orientation

Shape	Ask	Notes
Architecture	`architecture overview`	Use verbatim — it is its own shape.
Concept fallback	`how does retry backoff work?`	Legitimate when you cannot name a file or symbol yet.

The concept fallback is the right first move on an unfamiliar codebase — ask the concept question, take a file path from the answer, then follow up with a specific shape (what does `path` do?, what depends on `path`?).

Answer density

The one remaining density control is the answer format. By default each recipe picks its own preferred density; you can force it:

canopy answer "what depends on `src/lib/config.ts`?" --format standard

concise — the compact answer.
standard — fuller answer with citations.

The MCP tool accepts the same format parameter.

When you get “No strong match”

Canopy refuses to relay tangential files: if nothing clears the calibrated relevance floor, it answers No strong match in this repository for …. If you know the thing exists, sharpen the phrasing — put the symbol or file in backticks and name its kind (“the function …”, “the file …”). If it still comes back empty, that is a real signal the entity is not in the indexed repo.