🤖Serena
A powerful MCP toolkit for coding, providing semantic retrieval and editing capabilities - the IDE for your agent
⭐ Very popular: 28k stars, gaining about 320 a week
View on GitHub ↗repo profile
momentum
durability
bus factor = how many people it takes to cover more than half the commits (6 months). 1 is a solo project; higher means the work is spread across a team. top-author share is the single busiest author's slice of those commits.
since we covered it
why it's a big deal
- Gives coding agents symbol-level retrieval and editing instead of line-number or text-pattern edits, so operations like find references, rename, and safe delete act on actual code structure.
- Turns any MCP-compatible client, including Claude Code, Codex, Gemini-CLI, Cursor, and Claude Desktop, into a code-aware agent without paying for a proprietary indexer.
- A cross-session memory system lets agents carry project context across sessions rather than re-reading the codebase each time.
under the hood
- Runs as a Python MCP server that exposes retrieval, refactoring, and symbolic editing tools while the LLM orchestrates when to call them.
- By default it drives open-source Language Server Protocol servers, covering over 40 languages including Python, Java, TypeScript, Go, Rust, and C#, with an optional paid JetBrains plugin as an alternative backend.
- An abstraction layer sits between the tools and the backends, and behaviour is configured through YAML at global, per-project, and context levels, with install managed by the uv package manager.
Radar summary, generated from the project's public sources
star history
- PR#14 8k 2025-08-06
- now 28k + 21k since first covered
curve is sampled from GitHub's star history, plus our own daily readings since we covered it; the dashed stretch is before we first covered it, the solid line since. figures at coverage are the numbers we printed then (approx.), current count is live.
understory
Quietly building: more output than attention, for now.
- output, commits & releases
- clout, star velocity
output = commits & releases; clout = star velocity, both 0 to 100 monthly indices; the gap where output runs above clout is the understory. The understory →
covered in
-
Codebase-Native LLM Agent with Semantic Context
similar projects
compare these →- 🎨 taste-skill
JavaScript · 2.7× the stars
Taste-Skill - gives your AI good taste. stops the AI from generating boring, generic slop
77k ACTIVE - 🐑 herdr
Rust
the runtime your coding agents live on
30k ACTIVE - 💻 Superset
TypeScript · leaner, 13k stars
Superset is an agentic IDE to orchestrate 100+ coding agents in parallel. Run any agent with your own subscription.
13k ACTIVE
comments
Sign in with GitHub to add your blip on Serena.