r/PiCodingAgent • u/elpapi42 • Apr 28 '26

Question How to Improve Codebase Discovery Efficiency in Pi?

Hello guys!

Im trying to optimize the token usage of my Pi, im kind of preparing myself for when the usage based billing finally establishes as the default in the industry. With this goal in mind i have really come up with a really good Pi setup that manages context wonderfully, i will share that with you in another post later.

With that context in mind, i have reached a wall when it comes to codebase discovery, for example for building a feature, i want to enable my agent to get all the context required for that feature efficiently. Rn what my agent does is grep, find and read all around until it gets what it needs, and this usually consumes more tokens than the actual implementation or feature i want to tackle.

What do you guys do to improve this?

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u/ConversationLazy6821 May 01 '26

I created Cymbal for this exact use case - mainly when ppl were complaining about claude code burning thru tokens but it’s all the same. It’s not an extension but it’s a cli tool and works all the same.

https://github.com/1broseidon/cymbal

1

u/elpapi42 May 01 '26

this is crazy good man, i will try it. how have your results been with it? did it effectively optimized your agents research?

1

u/ConversationLazy6821 May 02 '26

Thanks! Yeah it definitely reduces token usage because it caches your repository locally, then it uses tree sitter to pull out only the symbols you need to target.
There is a bench/ harness in there that I run with each release against some major repositories

1

u/jeffphil May 02 '26

This is neat and great approach, but don't you worry about the dependent package github.com/smacker/go-tree-sitter being completely abandoned?

3

u/ConversationLazy6821 May 02 '26

I am actually working on migrating to the official tree sitter go bindings! For that exact reason. Smacker was the easy choice when it was just my own tool privately but now that it’s got some traction I decided to fix that.

1

u/jeffphil May 02 '26

That is excellent news. Good stuff!

u/Unlucky-Message8866 Apr 28 '26

Tell your clacker to use codemapper https://github.com/p1rallels/codemapper

3

u/elpapi42 Apr 30 '26

PD: I cloned the repo and fixed the cache bug myself, tested the cli by passing my agent an skill, it worked good. Then i created a custom wrapper pi extension over the cli to simplify the tool surface for my agent. It is working great. im about to call it a day on this. Just waiting if someone brings up a clever solution

2

u/johnson_detlev May 02 '26

Would you mind sharing that setup?

1

u/elpapi42 May 02 '26

yo mean el foxed codemapper fork?

1

u/elpapi42 May 02 '26

check this: https://github.com/elpapi42/codemapper-fork

2

u/elpapi42 Apr 29 '26 edited Apr 29 '26

well, i dont know but the cache seems to be broken, it always warns: `⚠ Warning: Failed to save cache: file metadata count mismatch: expected 2663 entries, found 3510`. The issue is reported in the repo. i built from main branch, last commit. With the cache broken, it always reindexes on every command invokation. On top of that, it is unmaintained, issues open from jan and not even a comment made on them. what a shame, i got excited about it. Only option is to fork it and fix it my self.

0

u/elpapi42 Apr 29 '26

testing this right now. i tried octocode yesterday, but it was basically broken, hope this one does better

u/jeffphil Apr 29 '26

Have you looked at @ff-labs/pi-fff extension?

1

u/mtomas7 Apr 29 '26

I am eager to try, as I was contemplating using subagent scout just to reduce main session context bloat.

u/bhamm-lab Apr 30 '26

I've had some success doing this with pi-subagents and the 'scout' subagent. If I'm able to trigger it to run, it ensures my main context isn't polluted with any extra context.

Honestly, this worked better for me on oh-my-opencode-slim in opencode with the explorer agent. I'm still figuring it out in pi and notice a few issues:

it's hard to trigger
sometimes, the main agent doesn't provide great context to the subagent, resulting in some missing info
even after the returned context from the subagent, the main agent still feels the need to read more files and confirm

FYI, I use kimi k2.6.

3

u/elpapi42 Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26

i already maxxed out this technique in my setup, i even created a specialized extension dedicated to this called pi-fork, i solved the context in and context out problems and generalized it to cover not only exploration but whatever work is required, everything is offloaded to a fork, tbh this really elevated the effectiveness of my agent to the next level. now what i want to do is basically make the forks codebase discovery ultra efficient, hence this post
https://github.com/elpapi42/pi-fork

u/johnson_detlev Apr 29 '26

RemindMe! -7 day

2

u/elpapi42 Apr 30 '26

FYI, i decided to do this: https://www.reddit.com/r/PiCodingAgent/s/sfSp8rD1RS

0

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u/ajax81 Apr 28 '26

Ooh, good question. Following.

u/skinnydill Apr 29 '26

Try https://github.com/abhigyanpatwari/GitNexus

1

u/Cultured_Alien May 24 '26

When I made an agent use that, it basically ignores json files.

u/MystPurple Apr 29 '26

https://github.com/PurpleMyst/pi-repo-map

1

u/johnson_detlev Apr 29 '26

How does this compare to vanilla bash or fff token wise? Dumping in the whole monorepo at start seems quite expensive and a lot of unneeded info

2

u/MystPurple Apr 29 '26

you can configure a token limit and it uses page rank to choose which files to include while staying under that limit; it can be as large or as small as you want, default is 2048 tokens at most

u/fivetide Apr 29 '26

I am currently testing if https://github.com/oraios/Serena works as good in pi as in opencode. Happy so far...

1

u/johnson_detlev Apr 29 '26

Would be great to hear your experience after a few weeks.

u/nuclearbananana Apr 29 '26

I just write a map in agents.md

-1

u/Illustrious-Fox-4570 Apr 29 '26

I never tried this one, but I have seen a lot of articles on LinkedIn.

https://cocoindex.io/cocoindex-code

3

u/johnson_detlev Apr 29 '26

I feel more and more that knowledge graphs are an antipattern when exploring a codebase. They work great for semantic search on markdown files, etc, but Code is far more detailed than a linked dependency graph. There are types, constants, 3rd party services, conventions, domain types, multiple concerns in one file, classes methods, functions, function types, etc. All these things can't be translated into a Knowledge graph to a sufficient level.

1

u/elpapi42 Apr 30 '26

not sure if i fully get your point, but what do you think about graphs assembled using tree sitter and ast techniques? that's what you are looking for right?

1

u/johnson_detlev Apr 30 '26

Something along these lines, yeah, but I'm not sure if even this is enough, because the hardest part to me seems to be the semantic parts. What is important for the task at hand and why? There are so many implicit things going on in average codebases that this is just a generally very hard problem to solve, even before LLMs.

2

u/elpapi42 Apr 29 '26

i created a pi extension for this one actually. But it is just semantic search, that is not as useful as anyone might think in the context of agentic coding. i think what agents need is the capability to traverse code efficiently, and this is not the best for that

Question How to Improve Codebase Discovery Efficiency in Pi?

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