Rift
Overview of the rift toolkit.
Rift is an agentic development toolkit for reading, discovering, and editing codebases.
If you're new to rift, we suggest starting from installing it and configuring your agent to use it in your project. For a better user experience, the skills could be of much help.
If you're interested in the core ideas and concepts behind rift, please read the vision page.
This page provides a very high-level overview of rift's capabilities.
Reads
When rift is running alongside your agents, it builds a local index of your project. This index is located purely on your machine, and changes together with it, as the codebase grows and changes over time.
Map
The first thing an agent usually does is try to understand the repository structure. Indeed, you
can put such facts into some kind of AGENTS.md file or skills, but usually they quickly get out
of sync as the project grows.
To simplify discovery, rift provides a map resource, which deterministically goes through the repository and provides a nice, up-to-date structure and context information about the project in a compact form.
The agent reads this information through the rift://map MCP resource.
Search
To avoid grepping through the entire codebase on a given task, rift provides a search capability which returns precise, fact-close information about the repository structure.
At the same time, there are almost no projects without dependencies, and using these dependencies is crucial for good codebase quality and effective context usage.
Search is also connected to the global index, allowing your agent to retrieve facts about relevant dependencies and their versions from it. The global index is based on top-used OSS dependencies for various languages.
The agent uses the search MCP tool to search project source and dependencies.
Symbols
When an agent precisely knows which symbol to look up (usually found via search), it can "zoom in" on a certain specific symbol. A symbol is practically a class or a function from a certain library (local or remote); retrieving it returns precise information about it, such as source code, documentation and signature.
The agent retrieves this information through the get_symbol MCP tool.