search

Search Checkpoints and Code

Use entire search to find prior checkpoints, commits, and sessions with hybrid (semantic + keyword) search, or entire search --code to search code content across repositories. Requires entire login. Never run entire search without --json — it opens an interactive TUI.

Execution Environment (Required)

On macOS, entire reads its credentials from the local secrets store, which is not available inside the Codex sandbox. Run every entire command used by this skill outside the sandbox on the first attempt. In Codex, invoke the shell tool with sandbox_permissions: "require_escalated" and a concise justification that the command needs access to the user's local Entire credentials. This applies to both entire search and entire checkpoint explain.

Do not first try an entire command in the sandbox, and do not treat a sandbox-induced credential error as evidence that the user needs to log in. Only report that authentication is required when an outside-the-sandbox invocation reports it.

Response Format

Begin the first response to this skill invocation with the line:

Entire Search:

followed by a blank line, then the content.

• Apply the header to the first response of the invocation only. Do not re-print it on follow-up turns within the same invocation (e.g. after the user answers a clarifying question).
• Do not include the header on error or early-exit responses (e.g. "Entire CLI not installed", "authentication required", "no matches"). The header's presence should signal that the skill ran and produced real output.

When to Use

• The user asks things like "have we done this before?", "search past work", "find the previous implementation", or "look for checkpoints about X"
• You need prior context from another branch, repo, author, or recent time period
• You want likely matches first, then a deeper transcript read only for the best hit
• The user wants to find code across repositories they have access to, e.g. "where is X implemented?", "find usages of Y in our other repos" — use code search (--code)

Do not use this for the current active session. Use session-handoff for that. For searching files in the current working copy, prefer local tools (grep, ripgrep) over code search.

Process

1. Run a focused search with compact JSON output:

entire search "<query>" --json --compact --limit 5

Each compact hit carries id, type (checkpoint, commit, session, repo, or pr), repo, branch, author, date, a truncated title, the matched snippet, filesTouched, and a relevance score — never the full prompt. Results are ranked by relevance; raise --limit (per page) or add --page (1-based) only when the first five have no good hit.

If the CLI rejects --compact as an unknown flag (versions before 0.10.0), drop it and keep --limit 5 — without --compact each hit embeds its full prompt, so a default page can run tens of KB.

Add filters when the user already gave them or when the first search is too broad:

entire search "<query>" --json --compact --limit 5 --repo owner/name --branch branch-name --author "Name" --date week

• --repo takes multiple repos: repeat it or comma-separate (--repo a --repo b, --repo a,b)
• Inline filters also work in the query: author:<name>, date:<week|month>, branch:<name>, repo:<owner/name>, repo:*
• Results default to the current repository. To search all accessible repos, pass --all-repos, write repo:* inside the query string, or pass --repo '*' (quoted). --repo repo:* is invalid — inline tokens never go in flag values.

2. Review the top hits and summarize the likely candidates for the user. Do not dump raw JSON unless they ask for it. If a hit's title, snippet, and filesTouched already answer the question, answer directly — do not run explain unless the user asks for details or the top hits are ambiguous. Prefer checkpoint and commit hits; session hits are projections of the same checkpoints.

3. To drill into a hit, pass its id (checkpoint ID or commit SHA, auto-detected) to:

entire checkpoint explain <id> --no-pager

• Add --full to pull the checkpoint's entire session transcript; if --full fails, fall back to --raw-transcript
• For a checkpoint hit from another GitHub repo, add --repo <owner/name> — it needs the full checkpoint id from the hit and a checkpoint that has been pushed. If the flag is unknown (versions before 0.10.0) or explain finds nothing, do not retry — answer from the compact fields instead
• For a session hit on the current branch, bridge with entire checkpoint explain --session <id>, which lists that session's checkpoints; explain one of those
• repo and pr hits (and sessions or commits from other repos or branches) cannot be explained — summarize them from the compact fields alone

Code Search

Add --code to search code content instead of checkpoints:

entire search "<query>" --code --json

Scope and refine with flags:

entire search "<query>" --code --json --repo owner/name --limit 20 --case-sensitive

• By default results are scoped to the current repository; add --all-repos (or repo:*) to search every repo the user can access, or list repos with --repo
• --case-sensitive only applies with --code
• --limit is the total result count for code search (not per page)
• --author, --branch, --date, --page, and --compact are checkpoint-search options — do not combine them with --code
• Present results as file paths with matching snippets; do not dump raw JSON unless asked

Code Search Heuristics

• Search for distinctive tokens: function names, error strings, config keys — not natural-language descriptions
• Prefer exact identifiers over partial words; add --case-sensitive when the identifier casing matters (e.g. HttpClient vs httpclient)
• Scope with --repo when the user names a repo; start with --all-repos when the code plausibly lives in another repo; otherwise start with the current repo and widen with --all-repos if nothing hits
• If a query is too broad, add a second distinctive term or increase specificity before raising --limit
• If code search fails or reports that some regions were skipped, treat results as incomplete: search locally checked-out repos with ripgrep/grep, or run a checkpoint search for prior work touching that code

Search Heuristics

• Start with the user's domain terms, feature name, error text, file name, or ticket ID
• Prefer narrower searches before increasing --limit
• Add --repo or repo:* explicitly when repository scope matters
• Escalate to --all-repos whenever the answer plausibly lives outside the current repo — infrastructure or deploy repos, another service in the stack, fleet-wide changes — rather than waiting for an empty result
• If there are no useful hits, broaden in this order: remove branch filter, widen date, simplify query terms, add --all-repos

Failure Modes

• If search says authentication is required, tell the user to run entire login
• If search says it "cannot search this repo yet", the repo is not indexed or its owner has not enabled semantic search — report that instead of retrying
• If there are no matches, say that clearly and mention the filters or query terms you tried
• If the user really wants the current session, switch to session-handoff instead of searching checkpoints