HelixML

Code intelligence

How Helix builds and uses a deep structural understanding of your codebase, for agents and for humans.

What code intelligence is

Helix Code Intelligence (powered by Kodit) builds a structured, searchable representation of your repositories. It's not a simple file index — it understands code structure: what each function does, how it connects to others, what patterns the codebase uses.

This index powers both human tools (semantic search, the wiki, the changelog) and agent tools (the same search capabilities, exposed via MCP so agents can query it during implementation).

Why it matters for agents

An agent without code intelligence works like a developer who's never seen your codebase:

  • Re-reads large swaths of files to build context
  • Misses relevant code elsewhere in the repository
  • Writes new implementations of things that already exist
  • Changes function signatures without finding all callers

An agent with code intelligence can:

  • Search for existing implementations before writing new ones
  • Find all callers of a function before changing it
  • Understand the architecture of a component before modifying it

In practice: less duplication, fewer broken interfaces, faster implementation.

How the index is built

When you connect a repository, Helix indexes it in the background:

  1. Parse — extract the code structure (functions, classes, imports, relationships) across all files and languages
  2. Embed — generate vector representations for semantic similarity search
  3. Store — write the index to Kodit's vector database (pgvector + vectorchord)
  4. Refresh — re-index changed files on every push

For most repositories, initial indexing completes in a few minutes. Very large repositories (500k+ lines) may take 15–30 minutes on first index.

Supported languages

Kodit supports all common languages including Go, Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Java, Rust, C/C++, Ruby, and PHP. The index quality is best for languages with strong structural conventions; dynamic languages with heavy metaprogramming may have lower recall.

The automated wiki

For each indexed repository, Helix generates a wiki — prose pages describing major components, their purpose, and their relationships. The wiki is:

  • Generated automatically from the code, not from comments or README
  • Updated on each push
  • Accessible to humans via the Code Intelligence tab and to agents via MCP

The wiki is not a substitute for good documentation, but it provides a floor: even undocumented codebases get a navigable overview.

Cross-repository search

Code intelligence works across all repositories attached to a project. An agent working on a frontend can search the backend's API to understand the contract before changing a type, for example.

You can also index external public repositories (shared libraries, SDKs) separately from your project repositories.

MCP access for local IDEs

The Kodit MCP server is accessible externally. Connect your local IDE or Claude Desktop to the same index your agents use:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "helix-code-intelligence": {
      "url": "https://your-helix-url/mcp/kodit",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer your-token" }
    }
  }
}

Find the URL and token in Settings → Code Intelligence → MCP Access.

Performance benchmark

In internal experiments on the SWE-bench coding benchmark, code intelligence improved agentic coding performance by 20% compared to agents without it. The improvement is largest on tasks that require finding and modifying existing code, and smallest on tasks that require writing new code from scratch.