New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: How do you give AI agents real codebase context without burning tokens?
Ask HN: How do you give AI agents real codebase context without burning tokens? 4 by donhardman | 0 comments on Hacker News. Working on a large Rust codebase. The token problem is real — Claude Code will happily spend $5 of context just trying to understand how two modules relate before writing a single line. And once context compaction kicks in, it's even worse — the agent loses the thread completely and starts grepping the same files again from scratch. Approaches I've tried: Feeding CLAUDE.md / architecture docs manually — helps, but gets stale fast. Cursor's built-in indexing — breaks on monorepos, and I don't love proprietary code going to their servers. Basic MCP server with grep — works for exact matches, useless for semantic queries. Eventually built something more serious: a local Tree-sitter indexer that builds a knowledge graph of file relationships and exposes it via MCP so agents query semantically instead of grepping blind. One tool call instead of 15 g...