Quickstart

Prerequisites

Docker (with Compose) is all the quickstart needs. The full development pipeline additionally uses Node ≥ 24, pnpm, Go, and uv — exact versions are pinned in the repo’s CONTRIBUTING.md.

One command

git clone https://github.com/abdalkadir/assembly.git
cd assembly
make quickstart

This brings up the knowledge API at http://127.0.0.1:8100 with the pinned shadcn/ui corpus ingested. It uses a deterministic fake embedder, so it needs no API keys and behaves identically on every machine.

The quickstart stack runs its own Postgres on port 5433 (the full dev stack uses 5432), so it won’t collide with a database you already have running.

Tear it down with:

make quickstart-down

Real embeddings

When you want real semantic retrieval, swap the embedder for Voyage (voyage-3):

EMBEDDER=voyage VOYAGE_API_KEY=your-key make quickstart

The fake embedder still matters after that: it keeps CI and the eval baseline deterministic and free. See Hybrid retrieval.

The full pipeline

The quickstart is the knowledge engine only. To run the whole intent-to-PR loop from source:

make dev-up        # full dev stack (Postgres on 5432)
make db-migrate    # apply database migrations
make corpus        # clone the pinned shadcn/ui corpus
make reingest      # scan → chunk → embed → index
make demo DESC="a settings page with a notifications toggle"

Generation calls Anthropic models, so make demo needs ANTHROPIC_API_KEY set. See Configuration for every variable.

Next

Connect your agent so Claude Code, Cursor, or any MCP client can query the corpus directly.