| name | org-search |
| context | fork |
| agent | Explore |
| argument-hint | query |
| description | Experimental Embark org-wide semantic search across multiple repositories |
Use this skill to research $ARGUMENTS across all available repositories, especially when the answer may live outside the current repo.
Use cases for cross repository search
- Find reusable components, libraries, or utilities. Before writing new code, check whether another repo already exposes a client, helper, or shared package that solves the problem.
- Locate prior art and reference implementations. Discover how other teams have already solved a similar design problem (e.g. retry logic, feature flag wiring, pagination, caching, auth middleware) so a new implementation can follow established patterns.
- Trace cross-service API consumers and producers. Given an endpoint, RPC, topic, or event name, find every repo that publishes or consumes it to understand blast radius before changing a contract.
- Find usages of a shared library, type, or symbol across the org. Useful for migrations, deprecations, and breaking-change planning — answer "who imports this?" when the symbol is defined in a shared package.
- Investigate unfamiliar systems and code ownership. When a request mentions a service, table, or feature you don't recognize, search the org to find the owning repo, its README, and entry points before asking a human.
- Audit security, compliance, or anti-pattern occurrences. Sweep all repos for risky patterns (hardcoded secrets shapes, deprecated crypto, banned dependencies, unsafe SQL) to scope remediation work.
- Discover configuration and infrastructure examples. Find how other services configure the same tool (CI workflows, Dockerfiles, Terraform modules, Helm charts, observability setup) to copy a known-good baseline.
- Cross-reference schemas, protos, and shared data models. Locate the canonical definition of a type or message and every repo that depends on it.
- Reproduce or correlate bugs across services. When a bug may stem from a shared dependency or duplicated logic, search the org for the same code path or error string.
- Onboarding and documentation lookup. Surface relevant docs, runbooks, and examples that live outside the current repo when the local codebase doesn't fully explain a workflow.
Workflow
- Find candidate repositories first. Run the experimental repo discovery command before searching code:
embark repo "<repo or domain terms>" --limit 30
Use short, discriminative repo terms from the request: product names, service names, team names, package names, or explicit repository names.
- Handle prefixed repository families carefully. If the request mentions a prefix or wildcard such as
jcp-*, treat it as a repository-family constraint.
- Query the prefix literally, for example
jcp and jcp-.
- Keep all suitable repos whose names start with that prefix.
- Do not replace a prefixed repo family with a similar unprefixed repo unless the repo results clearly show it is the right target.
- Preserve the exact repository
id returned by embark repo; do not infer ids from names.
embark repo "jcp-" # show all repos started with jcp- prefix
-
Select suitable repos. Prefer exact name matches, prefix-family matches, and repos whose description/path/language matches the task. If there are many candidates, search the most likely 5-10 first, then expand if results are weak.
-
Search selected repos in parallel. Invoke embark search once per selected repository, passing the repository id from embark repo with the id option supported by the installed experimental CLI:
embark search --repository-id "<repo-id>" --json-output --limit 10 "<semantic search query>"
If embark search --help shows a different repository-id flag, use that flag, but still pass the exact id from embark repo. Run independent repo searches in parallel when the agent environment supports parallel tool calls; otherwise keep results grouped by repository.
- Synthesize across repositories. Report which repos were searched, which repos had useful matches, and the strongest files/symbols found. If no suitable repo is found, say which repo filters were tried before stopping.
Search Guidance
- Use semantic, behavior-focused queries for
embark search; avoid one-word searches.
- Re-run
embark repo with narrower or prefix-aware terms before broadening code search.
- Use path filters only after repo-level matches identify likely directories.
- Keep repository names and ids visible in notes so later searches can be reproduced.
