CodeRAG

Token-efficient, structure-aware Code Intelligence + RAG for private source repositories.

# Full install — two commands, no Docker/sudo needed:
pipx install "coderag-ai[mcp,localdb]"
cd /path/to/your/project && coderag setup

That's everything: database, migrations, indexing, Claude Code MCP registration, the CLAUDE.md retrieval nudge, and the /token-lean skill. Ask Claude Code a question about your code and watch it retrieve symbols instead of reading whole files.

Languages: Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React (TSX/JSX), Go, Java, Rust.

CodeRAG indexes private source-code repositories, retrieves only the code relevant to a developer's request, builds a token-budgeted context package, and sends it to your organisation's Claude endpoint (or any LLM behind the LLMProvider interface).

Primary objective: reduce LLM input-token consumption without reducing answer quality — and prove it with measurements, never claims.

This is not a generic document-RAG app:

• Chunks are code constructs — functions/methods/classes/modules — via Tree-sitter, never fixed-size text slices. Works for Python, TypeScript/JavaScript (incl. React TSX/JSX), Go, Java, and Rust.
• Retrieval is hybrid: exact-symbol + PostgreSQL full-text (lexical) + pgvector (semantic)
  • a lightweight one-hop code graph, fused with Reciprocal Rank Fusion.
• Every result explains why it was retrieved (exact_symbol, lexical, semantic, graph_caller, graph_test, …).
• Embeddings run locally by default — no source code leaves your infrastructure.
• Retrieval works with no LLM. Only ask needs a provider.

What problem this solves

Instead of pasting whole files (or a whole repo) into a prompt, CodeRAG retrieves the smallest useful set of symbols for a task and packs them under a hard token budget, deduplicating overlapping code and dropping low-priority symbols before anything is sent externally. Token consumption is measured end-to-end and comparable against a naive baseline.

Architecture

flowchart LR
  G[Git repo] --> IDX[Indexer]
  IDX --> TS[Tree-sitter parse] --> SX[Symbols + graph]
  SX --> PG[(PostgreSQL + pgvector)]
  EMB[Local embeddings] --> PG
  Q[Query] --> SYM[symbol] & LEX[full-text] & SEM[vector]
  PG --- SYM & LEX & SEM
  SYM & LEX & SEM --> RRF[RRF fusion] --> EXP[1-hop graph expand]
  EXP --> RR[reranker*] --> CB[Context builder + token budget] --> LLM[LLMProvider] --> C[Claude]

Full details: docs/architecture.md, plus ADRs in docs/adr/ and topic docs for retrieval, security, evaluation, LLM providers, and adding a language.

Install

Two commands. Ships a rootless bundled PostgreSQL+pgvector — no Docker, Homebrew, or sudo:

pipx install "coderag-ai[mcp,localdb]"
cd /path/to/your-project && coderag setup

coderag setup starts the database, applies migrations, indexes the repo, registers the MCP server with Claude Code, and appends the retrieval nudge to your CLAUDE.md — the step that makes Claude Code actually call the tools. It records the database URL, so no export CODERAG_DATABASE_URL is needed; later commands find it automatically. Re-running is safe (it won't duplicate the nudge). Opt out with --no-mcp / --no-claude-md.

coderag search "where is authentication handled?"   # works in any new shell

Full walkthrough incl. Claude Code wiring: docs/install-macos.md.

Other install forms:

# from PyPI
pip install coderag-ai
# with local semantic embeddings (pulls torch, ~2GB)
pip install "coderag-ai[embeddings]"
# straight from git (no PyPI needed)
pipx install "coderag-ai[mcp,localdb] @ git+https://github.com/galacticsurfer/coderag"
# or clone + editable
git clone https://github.com/galacticsurfer/coderag && cd coderag && pip install -e ".[dev]"

Distribution name is coderag-ai (plain coderag was taken on PyPI by an unrelated project). The CLI command, the MCP binary, and the import name are all still coderag.

This installs the coderag CLI and the coderag.api.app FastAPI app. Extras: embeddings (SentenceTransformers), tokens (tiktoken), analyzers (pylint/flake8), metrics (prometheus). You still need a PostgreSQL+pgvector to point CODERAG_DATABASE_URL at (docker compose up -d provides one).

Quick start

Option A — Docker one-shot (recommended)

One command boots PostgreSQL+pgvector and the API, runs migrations, and indexes the bundled demo repo so the dashboard has data immediately:

make up          # == docker compose up -d --build
# open http://localhost:8000/dashboard   and   http://localhost:8000/docs

Index your own code (mount it, then run the indexer inside the container):

CODERAG_REPO_PATH=/abs/path/to/your/repo make up
docker compose exec api coderag index /workspace --name myrepo
docker compose exec api coderag search "where are failed payments retried?" --repo myrepo

Option B — Local (venv)

cp .env.example .env
docker compose up -d db                         # just Postgres+pgvector
make install && make migrate
coderag index ./examples/demo-repository
coderag search  "where are failed payments retried?"                # no LLM needed
coderag context "why can payment retry leave an invoice pending?"   # no LLM needed
coderag eval                                                        # Recall@K, MRR, tokens
coderag benchmark --compare-baseline                                # measured token savings
coderag ask     "why can payment retry leave an invoice pending?"   # needs an LLM (see below)

Do I need an API key?

No — for almost everything. index, search, context, eval, benchmark, and the /dashboard are pure retrieval + local embeddings + telemetry: no key, nothing leaves your box. Only ask calls an LLM to turn the retrieved context into a natural-language answer, so only ask needs CODERAG_ANTHROPIC_API_KEY (or an internal proxy / Bedrock — see docs/llm-providers.md). That separation is the whole point: you can run, measure, and demo the token savings with zero LLM credentials.

Indexing

coderag index /path/to/repo --name myrepo     # full index
coderag index /path/to/repo --incremental     # only reindex what changed since last commit

Respects .gitignore; skips vendored/generated/binary files and secret files (.env, *.pem, keys, …); redacts residual secret-shaped strings; never indexes credentials. Incremental indexing preserves embeddings for unchanged code.

Searching & context

coderag search "retry failed payment" --repo myrepo --limit 10
coderag context "why pending?" --show-prompt          # exact prompt + token accounting

coderag context prints the selected symbols by priority (target → dependencies → callers → tests → semantic → additional), the token accounting, and (optionally) the full prompt — so you can debug token usage without calling the model.

Claude configuration

Set in .env (never commit credentials):

CODERAG_LLM_PROVIDER=anthropic
CODERAG_ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-...
CODERAG_ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://api.anthropic.com   # or your internal proxy
CODERAG_ANTHROPIC_MODEL=claude-sonnet-5

The provider talks to the Messages API over HTTP, so pointing it at an internal proxy — or subclassing for AWS Bedrock — needs no changes to the retrieval layer (docs/llm-providers.md).

Embedding configuration

CODERAG_EMBEDDING_PROVIDER=hashing            # offline default (deterministic)
# or, for genuine semantics (installs torch): pip install 'coderag-ai[embeddings]'
CODERAG_EMBEDDING_PROVIDER=sentence_transformer
CODERAG_EMBEDDING_MODEL=sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2

The default hashing embedder is offline and deterministic (great for CI/air-gapped dev); similarity reflects shared vocabulary. Switch to the local SentenceTransformers model for true semantic matching — code still never leaves your infra.

Evaluation & token measurement

coderag eval --dataset examples/eval/eval_dataset.json
coderag benchmark --compare-baseline

On the bundled demo (offline hashing embedder), measured:

Measure it on your own repo (--measure)

coderag context "why can payment retry leave an invoice pending?" --measure

reports the counterfactual an agent actually faces — "instead of this context I'd have opened the files" — using per-file token counts recorded at index time:

Read that honestly: on the bundled demo that's only 8.3% saved, and the full prompt is bigger than the files it replaces. That's a real measurement, not a bug — with 11 tiny files, one-hop expansion reaches most of the repo and fixed scaffolding (~1.1k tokens) dominates. Savings scale with file size ÷ symbol size: pulling one 40-line method out of a 900-line service is where this wins, and that ratio is routine on a real backend. Recall@1 is likewise limited by the offline hashing embedder; the local SentenceTransformers model improves ranking.

So run --measure on your repository before believing any headline number, including ours. That's why the measurement ships instead of a claim. See docs/evaluation.md.

Security model

Source code is treated as sensitive: secrets are never indexed, credentials are redacted, full source/prompts are never logged, every retrieval query is scoped by repository_id (cross-repo isolation is a test, not a hope), and an AuthorizationProvider interface gates repository access. Retrieved code is delimited as untrusted data in the prompt to mitigate injection. See SECURITY.md and docs/security.md.

Limitations (MVP)

• Language depth varies: Python has the richest parser (docstrings, decorators, self-call confidence); TS/JS/TSX, Go, Java, and Rust use a spec-driven tree-sitter parser (symbols, imports, calls — no docstring extraction yet).
• Graph is syntax-heuristic: only in-repo, confidently-resolved edges are stored (incomplete-but-correct by design). Ambiguous/external calls are dropped.
• Exact vector scan (no HNSW yet — added when dataset size warrants).
• Token counts are estimates for budgeting; authoritative counts come from the LLM's usage report (stored in llm_requests).
• Default hashing embedder is lexical-overlap, not truly semantic.
• Analyzer workflow produces fix context + proposals; patch apply/verify is a caller interface (bounded by MAX_FIX_ATTEMPTS).
• The MVP AuthorizationProvider is permissive (development). Deploy a real one.

API

uvicorn coderag.api.app:app exposes POST /repositories, /repositories/{id}/index, GET /repositories/{id}/index/status, POST /search, POST /context, POST /ask, GET /symbols/{id}, /symbols/{id}/relationships, GET /metrics, GET /queries, and a GET /dashboard page.

Dashboard

A self-contained observability page at /dashboard (no external assets, light/dark) shows what was queried and how many tokens the budgeted context saved — KPI tiles (tokens saved, overall reduction, LLM tokens), a per-query "context vs. saved" bar chart, and a full query log. It reads the persisted queries/llm_requests telemetry via GET /metrics and GET /queries.

uvicorn coderag.api.app:app --port 8000   # then open http://localhost:8000/dashboard

Development

make lint typecheck test      # ruff + mypy + pytest

Tests use pgserver — a rootless, bundled PostgreSQL+pgvector — so the DB/FTS/vector paths are exercised for real, no Docker required.

Licensed under Apache-2.0 (see LICENSE / NOTICE). Dependency licenses (incl. the psycopg LGPL and pylint GPL flags) are in docs/licenses.md.

Use it to cut Claude Code's token usage (MCP)

Claude Code reads whole files to build context. Register CodeRAG as an MCP server and it can call coderag_context / coderag_search instead — getting only the budgeted, relevant symbols:

pipx install "coderag-ai[mcp]"
claude mcp add coderag \
  --env CODERAG_DATABASE_URL=postgresql+psycopg://coderag:coderag@localhost:5432/coderag \
  --env CODERAG_DEFAULT_REPOSITORY=myrepo -- coderag-mcp

Tools: coderag_context, coderag_search, coderag_symbol, coderag_repositories, coderag_index. Every call is recorded, so /dashboard shows the savings live. No API key needed — Claude Code is the LLM. Full step-by-step: docs/claude-code.md. Copy-pasteable .mcp.json + CLAUDE.md snippet, with real captured tool output: examples/mcp/.

The /token-lean skill

coderag setup also installs a Claude Code skill at ~/.claude/skills/token-lean/ (skip with --no-skill). It covers both levers:

• Input — prefer coderag_search / coderag_context over Glob/Grep/Read, with explicit guidance on when reading whole files is still the right call.
• Output — lead with the outcome, don't restate the request, don't echo visible code, don't narrate routine tool calls, no closing offer-lists. Output is billed at ~5× input, so this half usually matters more.

It loads automatically when a task looks token-sensitive, or invoke it explicitly with /token-lean.

Be clear about what it is: a set of instructions, not machinery. It cannot compress a prompt, place cache breakpoints, or route to a cheaper model — those need a proxy or gateway. A skill is also probabilistic (the model decides to apply it), where a proxy is deterministic. Its effect is not measured by CodeRAG, which only sees its own retrieval, never the host agent's total usage. Check your client's own cost reporting.

The observability proxy — measure real usage, not estimates

Everything above measures CodeRAG's own retrieval. Your agent's actual LLM traffic (Claude Code's real billed tokens) never passes through CodeRAG — until you run the proxy:

coderag proxy                                    # listens on 127.0.0.1:8788
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://127.0.0.1:8788  # point your agent at it

Every request is forwarded byte-for-byte unmodified — headers, body, streaming included. The proxy does exactly one extra thing: it reads the usage numbers out of responses and records them, so the dashboard's LLM input/output tiles show provider-billed tokens instead of zeros. That's what turns "estimated savings" into a before/after you can actually check.

Hard guarantees, enforced by tests:

• No compression, rewriting, caching, or routing. Anything that changes bytes can change model behaviour; this proxy never does. (Byte-fidelity is asserted in the test suite, streaming included.)
• No prompts, responses, or credentials are ever stored — only token counts, model, latency, and status.
• A database failure cannot break your traffic — recording is fire-and-forget.
• Binds to loopback only by default.

It chains: --upstream http://127.0.0.1:8787 forwards to another proxy (e.g. a compression proxy) instead of the API, so you can observe and compress: agent → coderag proxy (measure) → compression proxy → api.anthropic.com.

Opt-in automatic cache placement (--auto-cache)

Claude Code places its own cache breakpoints — but raw SDK scripts and many agents don't, and they bill an identical, growing prefix at the full input rate every turn when ~90% of it could bill at the 0.1× cache-read rate. coderag proxy --auto-cache injects the standard placement (last tool definition, last system block, last block of the final message) into requests that contain no cache_control at all; a client that manages its own caching is never touched, which also makes the transform idempotent. Metadata only — no prompt content is added, removed, or reordered. The doctor's no_caching detector tells you when this flag would pay for itself.

Opt-in model routing (--route)

coderag proxy --route claude-opus-4-8=claude-sonnet-5     # repeatable

The bluntest cost lever there is — a cheaper model is cheaper on every token — and the most dangerous, because it changes answer quality more than any compressor. So the policy is deliberately dumb: you name explicit source=destination pairs, the proxy rewrites exact model-ID matches, and nothing else happens. No heuristics guessing task difficulty, no automatic downgrades, off by default, loud warning when on. The proxy records the originally requested model alongside the served one, so coderag doctor reports measured routing savings (token counts x the published price difference) — and the expensive_model_dominant detector tells you when routing is worth trying at all.

Opt-in compression (--compress)

coderag proxy --compress

Adds a narrow, cache-safe compression layer for tool-result blocks only (logs, test runs, build output) in request bodies. Three deterministic transforms — ANSI stripping, consecutive-duplicate-line dedupe, blank-line squeeze — plus recoverable elision of oversized blocks: the middle is cut, the head/tail kept, and the raw original stored locally (~/.coderag/proxy-cache/, content-addressed). The marker names the key, and the agent can fetch the exact original back with the coderag_expand MCP tool.

The transforms are content-aware and route by shape: JSON tool results get a structure-preserving compressor (every object key survives, error-ish subtrees are never shrunk, long arrays keep their edges, long strings truncate); error/warning/traceback lines survive elision in logs (up to 40, in original order); diffs are exempt from elision entirely (every changed line is signal); oversized base64/hex blobs are elided recoverably. Everything stays deterministic and byte-exact recoverable.

Why the design is shaped this way:

• Deterministic, or it costs you money. The client resends original history every turn and the proxy recompresses it; prompt caching is a prefix match, so identical input must produce identical output or every turn invalidates the provider's ~0.1× cache discount. All transforms are pure functions — determinism is asserted in the test suite.
• Tool results only. System prompts, user text, assistant turns, and tool definitions are never touched.
• Guarded. Doesn't parse, doesn't shrink by a meaningful margin, or anything errors → the original bytes are forwarded untouched.
• The byte-fidelity guarantee applies to observe-only mode. --compress deliberately modifies request bytes; that's the trade. It is off by default for exactly that reason.
• Savings counters are on GET /coderag-proxy/health. Note the stored originals contain tool output from your machine — they stay local, in your home directory, and are never uploaded.

coderag doctor — where is the money actually going?

Once the proxy has observed some traffic, ask the doctor:

coderag doctor

It attributes every observed dollar to one of four categories — fresh input (1× the input price), cache reads (0.1×), cache writes (1.25×), output (typically 5× input) — and then runs a rule engine over your traffic to rank the levers by estimated $ impact:

Every diagnosis cites the observed numbers it rests on and states the assumption behind its estimate — because the honest answer is sometimes "this lever wouldn't help you". The same report is on the dashboard (/dashboard) and as JSON at GET /doctor. All dollar figures are estimates at the configured prices (CODERAG_PRICE_INPUT_PER_MTOK / CODERAG_PRICE_OUTPUT_PER_MTOK), computed from observed traffic — not billing data.

Every lever's measured effect lands in one place — the dashboard's doctor card (and coderag doctor / GET /doctor): retrieval savings, --compress tokens/$ saved (persisted per request, survives proxy restarts), --route savings at published price differences, the /token-lean skill's output effect, and the output caps' effect (capped vs uncapped requests, observational).

Terse output for any client (--terse)

The /token-lean skill only reaches Claude Code sessions that installed it. coderag proxy --terse makes the same output discipline client-agnostic: a fixed instruction block is appended to every request's system prompt (deterministic, idempotent, cache-safe — it becomes part of the cached prefix). The proxy flags each affected request, so the doctor reports the measured terse-vs-not output difference instead of assuming one.

The output side, measured and (optionally) capped

Output tokens are billed as they are generated — nothing can compress them after the fact, so every "output saver" (including ours) works by influencing what the model writes. CodeRAG does two things no instruction-only approach can:

• It measures whether the /token-lean skill actually works on your traffic. The proxy flags each request where the skill is active (a byte-marker check — no content is parsed or stored) and the doctor compares average output tokens/request across the two groups. Once both groups have ≥5 requests, the doctor's output-savings estimate uses your measured reduction instead of an assumption — and if the skill makes output longer, it says so. The comparison is observational (tasks differ between groups), and is labelled as such.
• Mechanical caps, opt-in, loudly labelled. coderag proxy --cap-output N clamps max_tokens downward in every request; --cap-thinking N clamps an explicit extended- thinking budget_tokens (adaptive thinking is never touched; nothing is ever raised or invented). These are real valves, not polite notes — and they deliberately trade answer quality for cost, which is why they are off by default and the CLI warns when they're on. Capped-request counts are on GET /coderag-proxy/health.

Composes with other token-efficiency tools

CodeRAG started on one slice of token spend — the code you'd otherwise read whole files to get — and has since grown levers for most of the others. Where the current coverage stands against tools like Caveman:

Remaining honest gaps on our side: Caveman still routes more content shapes (HTML, code, prose, with BM25 query-aware selection — lower value for coding-agent traffic, which is mostly logs/JSON/diffs), ships ~20 detectors to our 10, and its routing picks models automatically via evals where ours requires the user to name pairs (a deliberate choice: automatic downgrades gamble with quality; explicit pairs + measured savings don't). Remaining gaps on theirs: no retrieval (they shrink what's in the request; retrieval stops it entering), no per-workload measured skill/routing effects, and their proxy is BSL-1.1 where this entire stack is MIT.

Savings on disjoint slices are near-additive. On a typical mid-session turn, CodeRAG's measured file-slice reduction works out to ~26% of cost; adding an output-compression layer takes the combined figure to roughly ~38%. Both halves of that are models, not measurements — verify on your own workload before believing either.

Wiring: they use different mechanisms and don't conflict — CodeRAG is an MCP server, a compression skill is a Skill, a proxy is an ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL. CodeRAG's own ask can also route through such a proxy, since the LLM base URL is configurable:

export CODERAG_ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://localhost:<proxy-port>

Enable one at a time and compare /cost between them — a proxy that compresses context may be compressing context CodeRAG already minimised, so the marginal gain can be smaller than the two vendors' claims added together.

Editor integration (VS Code)

A ready-to-build extension lives in vscode-extension/ — commands for Index this workspace (the indexing step, one click), Search symbols, Show context, Ask about this code (right-click), and Open token dashboard.

cd vscode-extension && npm install && npm run package   # → coderag-vscode-0.1.0.vsix
code --install-extension coderag-vscode-0.1.0.vsix

Or download the prebuilt .vsix from the repo's Releases. It's a thin client — point coderag.serverUrl at your running CodeRAG server. Design notes: docs/vscode-extension.md.