vela

vela

Compiler-exact code search for .NET. Answers come from Roslyn's semantic model, so they are what the compiler believes rather than what a pattern matched.

Deterministic: no model calls, no network, and it never modifies the repository it indexes.

When to use this instead of grep

Use grep when the identifier is distinctive. grep -w PerfumeService returns thirty-two lines, costs nothing, and needs no index.

Use vela when:

• the name is ordinary - Name, Status, Value, Id, Update. Measured on a real solution, grep is 91 to 99% noise for these.
• you need callers, not just textual matches
• you need to know what breaks if you change something
• the symbol might be referenced from a .cshtml or .razor file. Nothing else indexes these, including grep, which finds the text but cannot tell you it binds to a specific property on a specific type
• grep returned more hits than you can read, which means the answer is now a context-window problem rather than a search problem

Steps

1. Ensure an index exists

vela index

Builds the index for the solution in the current directory. It costs about what a build costs: roughly 8 seconds on a scaffolded Razor Pages app, and about five minutes at 2.1GB peak on ScentVerdict, a real ten-project solution of 388,323 lines of C# with 334 Razor views, measured 30 July 2026. Expect it to scale with the solution rather than to match that figure. It is needed once, plus after any code change: the index is a snapshot, and every verb reports it as degraded once a watched file under the repository root is newer than it.

A deleted or renamed file is caught too, and by a different route: the index records the files it was built from, and every query compares that record against the tree. Without it a rename was invisible - moving a file keeps its modification time, so the new path is not newer than the index - and every reference to the file kept answering at exit 0, naming a path that could not be opened.