SCIP

SCIP (Source Code Intelligence Protocol) is an open format for code intelligence data. jarvis consumes SCIP indexes produced by language indexers and exposes them via 9 MCP tools.

How jarvis indexes code

1. Language detection — jarvis detects the primary language by file-extension plurality among git-tracked files (ties broken by a fixed priority order: .ts, .tsx, .py, .java, .kt, .swift). Override the detected language with jarvis index --language <name>.
2. Language indexer — the matching scip-* CLI (scip-python, scip-typescript, scip-swift, scip-java, …) emits a .scip protobuf file.
3. SCIP → SQLite — scip expt-convert (a fork with the scip#465 typeHierarchy fix) produces an index-<sha>.db SQLite database.
4. Atomic publish — jarvis flips the current pointer via os.replace() so queries never see a partially-built index.

The scip version gate

jarvis index refuses to run against a scip binary older than v0.9.0. This is not an arbitrary floor: below that version, scip expt-convert cannot read the .scip protobuf’s typed_range oneof, so it silently writes a schema-valid SQLite database with zero chunks and zero mentions rows — every navigation query then returns empty results with no error. The same .scip file measurably yields chunks=0/mentions=0 under scip v0.7.0 and chunks=1/mentions=14 under v0.9.0. setup.sh installs a build that satisfies the floor; if you see the version-gate error, re-run setup.sh and remove any older scip earlier on PATH. This is a settled decision, not a bug report to file: a silently-empty index is worse than a loud refusal to index at all.

The SQLite schema

The converted index (index-<sha>.db) contains these tables:

Table	Purpose
documents	Per-file metadata
chunks	Occurrence groups (used by documentSymbols)
global_symbols	Symbol definitions + metadata
mentions	Symbol references (used by nav tools)
defn_enclosing_ranges	Parent scopes
relationships	Super/subtype data (used by typeHierarchy — requires the fork build)

Single language per index

By design, each index covers one primary language. If a repo has mixed languages, jarvis picks the one with the most files by extension. You can override with jarvis index --language <name>.

Read-only queries

At query time, jarvis opens the SQLite index with mode=ro&immutable=1 — read-only, immutable. This means safe concurrent reads and no accidental mutations.

The fallback ladder

When a language indexer produces zero SCIP shards (e.g. Android/AGP projects, Kotlin version mismatches), jarvis automatically falls back to --search-only — Zoekt search is built but SCIP is skipped. Search works; navigation tools won’t. See Troubleshooting: Upstream Issues.