Concepts
This section explains the ideas behind Forge. Read these if you want to understand what’s happening under the hood — why the tool works the way it does, what its limits are, and how to reason about it.
Pages in this section
Section titled “Pages in this section”-
What Forge Is and Isn’t — positioning, what problem Forge solves, how it fits alongside AI coding agents.
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How Forge Works — the full pipeline from repo to structured intelligence: indexing, the three data stores, MCP server, and how agents consume tools.
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AST Parsing — why Forge uses tree-sitter ASTs instead of regex or line-based text search, and what that means in practice.
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MCP Protocol — what the Model Context Protocol is, how Forge implements it, and the 21 tools organized into workflow, search, graph, health, git, and ingest categories.
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License and Privacy — exactly what Forge sends over the network (one weekly call), what it doesn’t (your code, queries, file paths), and the air-gapped option for classified environments.
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Tool Catalog — all 21 MCP tools in one place with one-line descriptions and links to the Reference section.
If you’re in a hurry
Section titled “If you’re in a hurry”- Wondering if Forge will send your code anywhere? Read License and Privacy first.
- Evaluating Forge for your team? Read What Forge Is and Isn’t for an honest positioning.
- Want to know which tool to call when? Read Tool Catalog — it’s a one-page cheat sheet.