| FMRS | 62 / 100 · C | 80 / 100 · B | 79 / 100 · B |
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| Reliability | 10 / 20 | 14 / 20 | 12 / 20 |
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| Security and permissions | 12 / 20 | 16 / 20 | 16 / 20 |
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| Maintenance | 14 / 20 | 17 / 20 | 18 / 20 |
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| Documentation | 15 / 20 | 15 / 20 | 18 / 20 |
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| Setup experience | 11 / 20 | 18 / 20 | 15 / 20 |
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| Best for | - Teams and individual developers who want a maintainable knowledge graph for their codebase
- Users of coding agents who want them to work from stable, searchable context
- Projects that treat markdown as the documentation medium and want docs and source to stay in sync
- Environments that need offline semantic search (the default local WASM embedding model)
| - Developers using fast-moving frameworks/libraries worried about the AI suggesting stale code
- Scenarios wanting zero-config documentation lookup
| - Developers auditing NPM dependencies within AI workflows
- Teams performing supply chain security assessments
- Users of Claude Desktop, Cursor, or VS Code
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| Not for | - Small projects that only need a single flat AGENTS.md file (limited benefit from a knowledge graph)
- Teams that do not use coding agents and do not plan to maintain markdown domain docs
- Users expecting an out-of-the-box hosted service or a cloud multi-user documentation platform
- Projects unwilling to add // @lat: annotations to source code
| - Looking up internal/private codebase documentation (Context7 targets publicly published open-source libraries)
- Cases needing very high coverage of obscure, niche libraries (coverage depends on what Context7's platform has indexed)
| - Projects outside the NPM ecosystem (e.g., pure Python/Go)
- Environments without network access to deps.dev, OSV.dev, and the npm registry
- Scenarios requiring maintenance by an official upstream vendor
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| Required permissions | - Read/write access to the project repository (lat init creates the lat.md/ directory and configures coding agents' hooks and instructions)
- Read access to API keys when hosted embeddings are configured: the LAT_LLM_KEY environment variable, a file named by LAT_LLM_KEY_FILE, or a shell command named by LAT_LLM_KEY_HELPER
- Write access to local index and config (lat reindex and lat config involve local caches and a config file)
| - Usable without an API key (subject to a free-tier rate limit); CONTEXT7_API_KEY is an optional credential for higher quota
- Read-only documentation lookup — no code execution or local filesystem access involved
| - Network access to the NPM registry and external services (deps.dev, OSV.dev, OpenSSF, npms.io, GitHub)
- Read access to workspace lockfiles (pnpm-lock.yaml, package-lock., yarn.lock) for cache invalidation
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| Risks and side effects | - If hosted embeddings are used with an API key (OpenAI or Vercel AI Gateway), relevant text may be sent to an external service; the default local model makes no network requests
- LAT_LLM_KEY_HELPER executes a shell command to print the key; if that variable is set from an untrusted source it poses a command execution risk
- A key file with weak permissions could be read by other local processes
- A knowledge graph that is not kept up to date with lat check can drift from the actual code and mislead agents
- lat init modifies coding agents' hooks and instructions, which may affect existing workflows
| - The free tier has limited quota — high-frequency use may hit rate limits
- Documentation content comes from Context7's platform index, so its accuracy and freshness depend on that platform's crawl cadence
| - Third-party READMEs and changelogs are untrusted external content; they are wrapped in tags with _meta flags but should still be handled cautiously
- Depends on availability and accuracy of external services
- Batch requests are capped at 25 packages to prevent registry enumeration; larger sets require batching
- Third-party open source project, not officially maintained by NPM or Anthropic
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| Supported clients | | Claude Code, VS Code, Cursor, Cline, Amp | Claude Desktop, VS Code, Cursor, Smithery.ai |
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| Tools | 0 | 2 | 19 |
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