Semble
Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep
Get picks like this daily. Today's launch numbers, the top launches, AI and tech news, and a daily opportunity pick, straight to your inbox.
Want to reach these readers? Sponsor an issue.
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.So we built Semble. 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 servicesInstall in Claude Code with: claude mcp add semble -s user -- uvx --from "semble[mcp]" sembleOr check our README for other installation instructions, benchmarks, and methodology:Semble: https://github.com/MinishLab/sembleBenchmarks: https://github.com/MinishLab/semble/tree/main/benchmarksModel: https://huggingface.co/minishlab/potion-code-16MLet us know if you have any feedback or questions!
HN · launched May 3, 2026 · 8 upvotes (top 51%) · 0 views
Niche: semantic search and rag tools · 93 launches, 0 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Search & retrieval
- Developer
- AI-native
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 93 launches in semantic search and rag tools →
Could you build this?
Partial Building a simple AST or symbol indexer is accessible, but building a production-grade code search tool that reduces token usage by 98% compared to grep across huge codebases requires sophisticated code graph indexing, chunking, and ranking algorithms.
What it would actually take: A production tool needs a high-performance parser (such as tree-sitter bindings in Rust), symbol resolution algorithms, and efficient lexical/hybrid vector indexing. It must parse language constructs (functions, classes, references) and output compact, semantically dense summaries specifically formatted for LLM context windows. Deep systems engineering and compiler/parsing domain knowledge are required.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 625 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #343 of 626 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 180 days after the earliest competitor.
- CodeRLM · hn · 2026-02-11 · 81 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- WarpGrep: A 20x faster subagent to grep for code · yc · 2025-11-28 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Graft · hn · 2026-08-14 · 39 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- I Cut my Agent Tokens By 50% · hn · 2026-10-11 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Maxxwell · hn · 2026-09-09 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Edgee Claude Code Compressor V2 · ph · 2026-07-06 · 179 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- I nerfed our coding agents on purpose · hn · 2026-06-05 · 27 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Agentmemory · ph · 2026-05-16 · 322 upvotes · similarity 0.47
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.