Polaris Pro: now your agent can read the code too

Your code, not just your Markdown

Free Polaris indexes .md files. With a Pro license, a single polaris index pass also ingests source code, plus PDF, .docx, .pptx, HTML, plain text and reStructuredText, converting each in memory and feeding it through the same hybrid retrieval pipeline your docs already go through.

Your agent stops grepping the docs and stops grepping the codebase: one local context layer over everything in the repo, ranked. We haven't measured code retrieval yet, so here's the number we do have: on Markdown docs, ~530 tokens per query against a 10.7–15.4k grep-and-read baseline. Code goes through that same pipeline. Run polaris savings on your own repo and tell us what it does there.

• One command, not two: the same polaris index you already run, with the flags you already pass. No separate ingest step to remember, and the walk stays gitignore-, hidden-file- and deny-list-aware, so node_modules never lands in your index
• Nothing dropped silently: failed and empty conversions are counted and warned about, so a PDF that didn't convert never becomes an answer your agent gives confidently without it
• Purge-aware: a source deleted from disk leaves the index on the next pass, so your agent never cites the file you deleted last week

Offline license activation

Licenses are ed25519-signed and verified offline against a public key baked into the binary. Activation only writes the key to disk after it verifies. Malformed keys, tampered signatures, and expired licenses are all rejected. There is no license server in the path of a search: every query you run works with the network unplugged.

One exception, stated plainly: a paid license checks in once a day. That request carries the license key and nothing else: never your code, your docs, your queries, or your index. A subscription refreshes so a renewal upstream doesn't lapse on your machine. A lifetime license carries a rolling one-year expiry that the same check renews, which is why a lifetime key keeps working for a full year with no network at all.

That check is also how a refund revokes a license, and the threshold is deliberately conservative: two consecutive definitive refusals, and only a definitive one counts. A server error, an outage, or a day spent offline resets the counter. One bad response can never de-license someone who paid.

$ polaris license activate polaris-pro-eyJlbWFpbCI6...
Activated for dev@example.com

$ polaris license status
Licensed: dev@example.com

A private update channel

Licensed polaris update pulls from an authenticated signed-URL endpoint, verifies the download's SHA-256, and self-replaces the binary. It skips a version that's already current unless you pass --force, can pin a specific --version, and --check queries the channel read-only, so you can see what's coming before anything lands. Without a license, polaris update keeps pulling from the public GitHub releases, unchanged.

Worth the paranoia: an update channel that can put a new binary on the machine holding your private repos is one you want cryptographically pinned, not merely trusted. Hence the signature and the digest.

$ polaris update --check
Pro update available: 0.1.0 -> 0.1.1 (run `polaris update` to install)

$ polaris update
Updated to 0.1.1

The free path is untouched

Pro is a strict superset. Without a license it behaves exactly like the free CLI. Every existing command, hook, and MCP integration keeps working as before, and polaris update falls back to the public GitHub releases. You only ever pay for the extras.

And if a license lapses, your index survives. Free and Pro share the same database schema, and a document only leaves the index when its source file is gone from disk, so the free binary opens a Pro-built index without deleting the code and PDF rows it couldn't have produced itself. You stop ingesting new non-Markdown files. You don't lose the ones you already indexed.