Introduction
dev-agent provides semantic code search and context bundling to AI assistants like Cursor and Claude Code via MCP.
We built this for ourselves. When exploring large codebases, we found AI tools spending too much time grepping through files and reading entire files to find relevant code. dev-agent gives them a faster path: search by meaning, get code snippets, bundle context.
What it does
- Indexes your codebase locally with embeddings (all-MiniLM-L6-v2)
- Returns code snippets — not just file paths, reducing input tokens by 99%
- Bundles context —
dev_planassembles issue + code + commits in one call - Integrates with GitHub to search issues and PRs semantically
Measured impact
We benchmarked dev-agent against baseline Claude Code across different task types:
| Task Type | Cost Savings | Time Savings | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Debugging | 42% | 37% | Semantic search beats grep chains |
| Exploration | 44% | 19% | Find code by meaning |
| Implementation | 29% | 22% | Context bundling via dev_plan |
Key insight: Savings scale with task complexity. Simple lookups show no improvement; complex debugging shows 42% cost reduction.
Trade-off: Faster but sometimes less thorough. Baseline Claude provides more diagnostic shell commands.
Why it saves money
| What dev-agent does | Manual equivalent | Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Returns code snippets in search | Read entire files | 99% fewer input tokens |
dev_plan bundles issue + code + commits | 5-10 separate tool calls | 29% cost reduction |
| Semantic search finds relevant code | grep chains + filtering | 42% cost reduction |
Key Features
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Context Bundling | dev_plan replaces 5-10 tool calls with one |
| Code Snippets | Search returns code, not just file paths |
| Semantic Search | Find code by meaning, not keywords |
| Git History | Semantic search over commits |
| 100% Local | Your code never leaves your machine |
Architecture
dev-agent is a monorepo:
- @lytics/dev-agent-core — Scanning, vector storage, GitHub integration
- @lytics/dev-agent-cli — Command-line interface
- @lytics/dev-agent-mcp — MCP server with 9 tool adapters
- @lytics/dev-agent-subagents — Planner, explorer agents
Next Steps
- Installation → — Get dev-agent installed in under 2 minutes
- Quickstart → — Index and search in 5 minutes
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