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RTFM

Index code, docs, PDFs and research into one local SQLite file your agent searches before it greps.

by roomi-fields ↗Vector Stores & RAG RetrievalCommunity

LABSCO SUMMARY

Built because a smarter model did not fix a retrieval problem.

The author's case — a 2,000-file legal corpus where Claude Code looped on grep and produced confident wrong citations — is the honest framing: this is a retrieval layer, not an intelligence upgrade. The design choice that matters is metadata first, content on request, which keeps a large corpus from becoming a context dump. Code indexers only see code; this indexes the PDFs and specs alongside it.

What it is

RTFM is a retrieval layer for coding agents. One command indexes everything in a project — source, specs, PDFs, legal texts, vault notes — into a single SQLite file, and the agent queries that with full-text, semantic or hybrid search instead of grepping directories in loops.

What you get

  • Search and reading — rtfm_search over the index, rtfm_context for a subject as metadata only, rtfm_expand to open every chunk of a source with full content
  • Orientation — rtfm_discover scans project structure in about a second with no indexing needed, rtfm_books lists indexed documents, rtfm_stats reports library statistics
  • Index management — rtfm_sync for incremental directory sync, rtfm_ingest for a single file, rtfm_remove to drop one
  • Structure and history — rtfm_graph shows a source's dependency graph of imports and links, rtfm_history shows file versions and memory snapshots, rtfm_tags and rtfm_tag_chunks label specific chunks
  • Progressive disclosure by design: the agent sees roughly 300 tokens of metadata first and expands only what is relevant
  • Optional extras install on demand into an isolated venv — FastEmbed ONNX for semantic and hybrid search, pdftext for fast PDF extraction, or marker-pdf with CPU-only torch for complex layouts

Requirements

Python 3.10+ on PATH; the Claude Code plugin bundles its own MCP server and needs no pip install. Install it with /plugin marketplace add roomi-fields/claude-plugins then /plugin install rtfm@roomi-fields; it auto-initialises each project, creates .rtfm/library.db, injects search instructions into CLAUDE.md, pre-grants tool permission and re-indexes incrementally. For Cursor, Codex or Claude Desktop chat, pip install rtfm-ai, run rtfm init in the project, and point the client at rtfm-serve. Runs locally with no API keys and no cloud. Package version 0.28.1. MIT.

Setup effort

One command — pip install rtfm-ai

See installation options