First steps

Your repository is indexed and your assistant is connected. Here is how to put it to work.

The shift is simple: instead of letting the assistant guess from whatever happens to be in its context window, let it query the index first. You do not have to learn special commands — just ask for work, and a connected assistant reaches for cix on its own.

Good first prompts

• "Give me an orientation of this project — stack, entry points, and where things live."
• "Does a helper for X already exist before you write one?"
• "What depends on SomeFunction? What breaks if I rename it?"
• "What columns does the users table actually have?"

What good looks like

A grounded assistant searches before it writes, reads only the symbols it needs, verifies schema instead of inventing it, and checks impact before a refactor. When the index does not know something, it says so rather than guessing.

Keep it sharp

The index is most useful when it reflects your current code. See Keep your index fresh and Understanding index state. Working in more than one repository? See Working across repositories.