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esafaklast Tuesday at 8:54 PM1 replyview on HN

What is "cognitive code search" "without embeddings"? Do you mean you accept natural language queries and create embeddings on-the-fly?

edit: That's structural or syntax-aware search.


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marcoaapforteslast Tuesday at 9:11 PM

No embeddings at all, neither stored nor on-the-fly.

Instead of converting queries to vectors, Mantic.sh uses structural inference, it ranks files based on path components, folder depth, naming patterns, and git metadata.

So "stripe webhook" matches /services/stripe/webhook.handler.ts highly because the path literally contains both terms in logical positions, not because their embeddings are close in vector space.

"Cognitive" just means it mirrors how developers already think about code organization, it encodes intent into paths, so searching paths directly often beats semantic similarity.

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