Your First Questions

Canopy exposes one tool, and phrasing picks the recipe: a deterministic router reads your question and dispatches it to the right answer path. Two rules get you precise answers every time:

1. Name the entity type — “the function”, “the struct”, “the file”.
2. Backtick paths and symbols — `src/auth/session.ts`, `createSession`.

Try these from the CLI (or ask your agent the same things — it makes the identical call):

Find things

canopy answer "where is the function \`createSession\` defined?"
canopy answer "show \`RetryPolicy\` in \`src/lib/retry.ts\`"
canopy answer "list functions defined in \`src/api/\`"

Each returns file:line locations from the AST index — not a pile of grep hits.

Trace impact (before you touch anything)

canopy answer "what depends on \`src/payments/checkout.ts\`?"
canopy answer "what should I know before editing \`src/core/config.ts\`?"
canopy answer "what tests cover \`src/billing/\`?"

The dependents answer is the blast radius — every file that imports the one you’re about to change. The pre-edit dossier combines dependents, coverage, and recent history into one answer.

Understand structure

canopy answer "architecture overview"
canopy answer "what does \`src/auth/session.ts\` do?"
canopy answer "public surface of \`src/lib/db.ts\`"
canopy answer "are there import cycles?"
canopy answer "is \`src/utils/legacy.ts\` dead code?"

Ask about history

canopy answer "who last changed \`src/api/orders.ts\`?"

When phrasing is vague

A question with no entity type and no backticks — “how does checkout work?” — falls back to semantic search over the embeddings. It works, but it’s the weakest recipe. If you know what kind of thing you’re asking about, say so: the specific shapes above are faster, cheaper, and more precise.

Note

If nothing in the repo clears the relevance bar, Canopy answers “No strong match in this repository” with suggestions — it never dresses up tangential files as an answer. An empty result is a signal you can trust.

The habit that pays off

Before any refactor, ask two questions:

what depends on the-file-you're-changing?

what tests cover the-file-you're-changing?

Thirty seconds of blast-radius reading prevents the classic agent failure: confidently editing a file that fourteen other modules import, then breaking half of them. Your agent does this automatically once Canopy is wired in — the handshake instructions teach it to check before it edits.

Next

• Concepts: One Tool — canopy_answer — every question shape and how routing works.
• Concepts: Phrasing Picks the Recipe — good/weak phrasing pairs for each shape.