Laika Orbit recall
Zero-model recall over your files. Ask a question, get back the exact section that answers it
and the file it came from, in about a millisecond, without calling a model. Built for Claude Code:
as an MCP server it replaces grep-and-read-whole-files with one call, using far fewer tokens.
The retrieval engine inside Laika Orbit, published on npm as laikaorbit.
Use it with Claude Code
claude mcp add laikaorbit -- npx -y laikaorbit mcp
Claude Code starts the server in your project folder and gets three tools: recall (answer a
question with the matching section and its source), get (read a file) and status. To point it
at another folder, add --root <dir> after mcp.
Use it from the terminal
npx laikaorbit index
npx laikaorbit recall "how do we roll back a deploy"
npx laikaorbit lint
npx laikaorbit ask "…"
Every command takes --root <dir>; otherwise the corpus is BRAIN_ROOT, then the working directory.
How it finds the answer
Seven steps, none of them a model call: tokenise the question on word boundaries, score it against
an inverted index, keep the top five with a confidence margin, open only the winner, slice out the
matching ## section, follow at most one pointer, and pack the result.
It works on any folder of Markdown and text. It works best with router files: short typed
pointer lists in brain/routers/*.md that say where things are, written the way questions are
asked:
## 1 — deploys
- Files: notes/deploy.md — how production deploys are rolled back
- Rules: notes/freeze.md — no deploys on Fridays after 2pm
Which folders are indexed, and how, is set in brain/index.config.json (optional). .docx, .rtf
and .odt are read with macOS textutil, and PDFs with pdftotext when it's installed.
Requirements
Node 22 or newer. Nothing leaves your machine: it reads local files and makes no network calls.
Licence
MIT © Laika Dynamics Limited