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Mantic.sh

A structural code search engine for AI agents

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Author here! Some context: I published this 48 hours ago and it was auto-listed on MCPMarket (the MCP tools directory). Got 700+ organic downloads with zero marketing—developers were actively searching for exactly this solution.The "Git Accelerator" optimization story:Initially used a file walker that took 6.6s on Chromium. Profiling showed 90% was filesystem I/O. The fix: git ls-files returns 480k paths in ~200ms. Added smart heuristics for untracked files (only scan dirs <50k files), bringing total to 0.46s.Why this matters: Agents can't wait 10 seconds for search. Sub-500ms makes it feel instant, changing how they explore codebases.Installation: Cursor: npx mantic.sh@latest VS Code: npx mantic.sh@latest CLI: npm i -g mantic.sh Limitations: Mantic is optimized for precise queries ("find stripe webhook") where structure matters. For fuzzy exploratory search, traditional embeddings may still be better. Curious if HN has ideas for hybrid approaches.Happy to answer questions!

HN · launched Jan 6, 2026 · 81 upvotes (top 12%) · 0 views

Niche: ai agent development platforms · 598 launches, 22 in the last 7 days ▼ -29% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Horizontal
  • Search & retrieval
  • Developer
  • AI-native
  • Commercial product

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 598 launches in ai agent development platforms →

Could you build this?

Yes A structural code search CLI/MCP server can be built by wrapping tree-sitter or AST parsers and git commands to search symbols and code structures efficiently.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: fzf (fuzzy finder), IDE file pickers, Traditional semantic search tools with embeddings

Concerns raised: Path-dependent ranking unreliable on large/non-standard codebases (Chromium repo fails), Scanner fails on certain project structures, .gitignore issues prevent finding source files, Only returns package.json on some projects, AGPL license concerns for commercial use

Feature requests: Support for Python, Rust, Go language-specific patterns, Two-pass scoring with function/class name extraction, Configurable timeout via MANTIC_TIMEOUT env var, Better handling of non-standard project layouts and monorepos

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 250 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #37 of 251 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 61 days after the earliest competitor.

Related data

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