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Posted by Bibabomas 14 hours ago

Show HN: Semble – Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep(github.com)
Hey HN! We (Stephan and Thomas) recently open-sourced Semble. We kept running into the same problem while using Claude Code on large codebases: when the agent can't find something directly, it falls back to grep, reading full files or launching subagents. This uses a lot of tokens, and often still misses the relevant code. There are existing tools for this, but they were either too slow to index on demand, needed API keys, or had poor retrieval quality.

Semble is our solution for this. It combines static Model2Vec embeddings (using our latest static model: potion-code-16M) with BM25, fused via RRF and reranked with code-aware signals. Everything runs on CPU since there's no transformers involved. On our benchmark of ~1250 query/document pairs across 63 repos and 19 languages, it uses 98% fewer tokens than grep+read and reaches 99% of the retrieval quality of a 137M-parameter code-trained transformer, while being ~200x faster.

Main features:

- Token-efficient: 98% fewer tokens than grep+read

- Fast: ~250ms to index a typical repo on our benchmark, ~1.5ms per query on CPU (very large repos may take longer)

- Accurate: 0.854 NDCG@10, 99% of the best transformer setup we tested

- MCP server: drop-in for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode

- Zero config: no API keys, no GPU, no external services

Install in Claude Code with: claude mcp add semble -s user -- uvx --from "semble[mcp]" semble

Or check our README for other installation instructions, benchmarks, and methodology:

Semble: https://github.com/MinishLab/semble

Benchmarks: https://github.com/MinishLab/semble/tree/main/benchmarks

Model: https://huggingface.co/minishlab/potion-code-16M

Let us know if you have any feedback or questions!

241 points | 71 commentspage 3
esafranchik 12 hours ago|
Is the benchmark measuring one-shot retrieval accuracy, or Coding agent response accuracy?
stephantul 12 hours ago|
Hey! Co-author here. The benchmark currently only measures retrieval accuracy.

We’re interested in measuring it end to end and also optimizing, e.g. the prompt and tools, for this, but we just haven’t gotten around to it.

esafranchik 11 hours ago||
Two follow-ups:

1) How do you compare accuracy? by checking if the answer is in any of the returned grep/bm25/semble snippets?

2) How do you measure token use without the agent, prompt, and tools?

stephantul 11 hours ago||
1) yes! It’s not accuracy, but ndcg 2) we assume that if the agent gets the correct answer in the returned snippets it does not need to read further
esafranchik 11 hours ago||
Wouldn't NDCG/token results vary wildly depending on the agent's query and the number of returned items?

e.g. agents often run `grep -m 5 "QUERY"` with different queries, instead of one big grep for all items.

stephantul 11 hours ago||
The same holds for semble: the agent can fire off many different semble queries with different k/parameters.

I guess the point we’re trying to make is that you need fewer semble queries to achieve the same outcome, compared to grep+readfile calls.

mrpf1ster 11 hours ago||
Does this work well for non-coding documents as well? Say api docs or AI memory files?
stephantul 10 hours ago|
Hey, this is something we're actively investigating. We recently added a flag, `--include-text-files`, which, when set, also makes Semble index regular documents (i.e., markdown, text, json). This should also work relatively well.
porker 7 hours ago||
Congratulations on the release!

Could you add fff to the benchmarks?

stephantul 1 hour ago|
We hadn't found that one yet. Will do!
ramsono 6 hours ago||
Very useful thanks for sharing!
jasonli0226 3 hours ago||
thanks for sharing!
vemulasukrit 3 hours ago||
Nice!
ludicrousdispla 11 hours ago||
grep doesn't need tokens, so what is 98% fewer than zero?
stephantul 11 hours ago|
You need readfile to do something with those tokens. Grep only gives you the matching lines, not the context.
djaboss 10 hours ago||
`grep -C $NUM` ? ;)
stephantul 10 hours ago||
Even so. Take a look at the NDCG numbers for grep. It's not pretty
hparadiz 2 hours ago||
ripgrep exists though
stephantul 1 hour ago||
The comparison is with ripgrep, see the benchmarks.
ind-igo 2 hours ago||
[dead]
billetkit 1 hour ago||
[flagged]
vikeri 8 hours ago|
very curious to give it a spin but why write a cli in python? would surely be faster and more portable with go or rust?
skeledrew 6 hours ago|
Perhaps Python is their main language (they seem to be ML peeps, which would make that most likely), which means it's easier for them to do manual reviews even if they're using AI for implementing, etc.
stephantul 1 hour ago||
Yes, this is the main reason. We've released some rust stuff in the past, but Python is our main language