{"slug": "semble", "name": "Semble", "category": "search", "category_name": "Search", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 9, "warners": 0, "score": 3.893, "rising": -0.98, "first": "2025-11-07", "latest": "2026-09-11", "why": "Cool project. I built a custome IDE and coding agent harness and will integrate this into it.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 3, "compare": 3, "warn": 0}, "spark": [1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "Cool project. I built a custome IDE and coding agent harness and will integrate this into it.", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": null, "github_repo": "github.com/minishlab/semble", "official_url": "https://github.com/minishlab/semble", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Semble", "semble"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 770818466, "item_id": 48176154, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176154", "by": "Bibabomas", "date": "2026-05-17", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I think the whole value proposition of semble is that you don't have to do that initial read at all", "excerpt": "In practice this rarely happens though, at least in practice I rarely see agents \"grep -C N\" or something like that on files it didn't read yet. I use Claude Code and OpenCode extensively, and especially during the first pass through a codebase that is not well understood the agent often just does \"cat file\" or something similar and gets the entire file in context first, and only then starts doing more finegrained se", "context": "", "use_case": "code search for agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Semble \u2013 Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep"}, {"id": 770808032, "item_id": 48175502, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175502", "by": "digitaltrees", "date": "2026-05-17", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Cool project. I built a custome IDE and coding agent harness and will integrate this into it.", "excerpt": "Cool project. I built a custome IDE and coding agent harness and will integrate this into it. If you\u2019re interested in a collaboration, I\u2019d be happy to share revenue to sponsor your open source repo. https://calendly.com/ryanwmartin/open-office-hours", "context": "", "use_case": "Code search for agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Semble \u2013 Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep"}, {"id": 746843331, "item_id": 46677708, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46677708", "by": "danabramov", "date": "2026-01-19", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "all of these apps work this way", "excerpt": "Yeah, that's what I was trying to say with the article. And this is not theoretical, all of these apps work this way: https://bsky.app/, https://leaflet.pub/, https://tangled.org/, https://semble.so/, https://blento.app/ (new one). It's definitely possible!", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "A Social Filesystem"}, {"id": 733635328, "item_id": 45852208, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45852208", "by": "OneDeuxTriSeiGo", "date": "2025-11-07", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "This is a neat project that I've been following.", "excerpt": "This is a neat project that I've been following. They just opened up the alpha version of their service. It's pretty bare bones but for an alpha it has quite a bit of potential. Related Blogpost: https://notes.cosmik.network/3m52o6mcd6c2z Roadmap: https://github.com/orgs/cosmik-network/projects/1", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Semble \u2013 A social knowledge network for researchers built on ATproto"}]}], "caveats": [], "who": [], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["code search for agents", "social bookmarking collections"], "compared": [], "makers": [{"id": 770819136, "item_id": 48176196, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176196", "by": "Bibabomas", "date": "2026-05-17", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Hey, we do a couple of things specifically to prevent supply-chain attacks.", "excerpt": "Hey, we do a couple of things specifically to prevent supply-chain attacks. We use trusted publishing on PyPI, and --exclude newer for uv's package resolution. We also try to use the least amount of dependencies possible. A transitive dependency could in theory still be problematic though, e.g. if there's a supply-chain attack on numpy. The tool itself is fully local though, so there's no real security risks there, t", "context": "", "use_case": "Code search for agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Semble \u2013 Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep"}, {"id": 770818640, "item_id": 48176165, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176165", "by": "Bibabomas", "date": "2026-05-17", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it's deliberately designed as a local, non-intrusive alternative to other solutions", "excerpt": "Yeah this is a good point, but it's complicated to do well since semble then has to be aware of everything else that happens in a session, which would then make it more intrusive (and it's deliberately designed as a local, non-intrusive alternative to other solutions). I'm thinking that perhaps we can do an isolated opt-in benchmark for this perhaps.", "context": "", "use_case": "Code search for agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Semble \u2013 Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48169874", "title": "Show HN: Semble \u2013 Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep", "mentions": 8}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49656471", "title": "RTK reports token savings, but our cost benchmarks disagree", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47948603", "title": "Tangled \u2013 We need a federation of forges", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665839", "title": "A Social Filesystem", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45852174", "title": "Semble \u2013 A social knowledge network for researchers built on ATproto", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 1}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-05": {"compare": 2, "recommend": 1, "neutral": 2}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {"compare": 1}, "2026-10": {}}, "versions": [], "version_unnamed": 0, "family_ref": null, "runs_on": null, "lines": [], "quotes": [{"id": 794583153, "item_id": 49661447, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49661447", "by": "gslepak", "date": "2026-09-11", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "How does lumen compare to semble?", "excerpt": "How does lumen compare to semble? https://github.com/MinishLab/semble", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "RTK reports token savings, but our cost benchmarks disagree"}, {"id": 771294577, "item_id": 48205911, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48205911", "by": "kurtextrem", "date": "2026-05-20", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "semble vs pgr", "excerpt": "Related read (not from me): https://entire.io/blog/improving-agentic-search-in-coding-agents > The clearest result was that faster search alone only modestly helps, while better-ranked results improve first-query retrieval and help agents find the right code sooner. Their tool \"pgr\" is a research preview only, so it'd be interesting to see semble vs pgr. I'm also collecting other tools that are similar, most notably ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Semble \u2013 Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep"}, {"id": 770842257, "item_id": 48177641, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177641", "by": "zikani_03", "date": "2026-05-18", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "definitely planning to try out semble", "excerpt": "I was going to share a link to this. Thank you for making `cs`, I use it both with LLMs and directly in the terminal, despite not performing indexing it's pretty fast for my needs. Also definitely planning to try out semble.", "context": "", "use_case": "Code search for agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Semble \u2013 Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep"}, {"id": 770818466, "item_id": 48176154, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176154", "by": "Bibabomas", "date": "2026-05-17", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I think the whole value proposition of semble is that you don't have to do that initial read at all", "excerpt": "In practice this rarely happens though, at least in practice I rarely see agents \"grep -C N\" or something like that on files it didn't read yet. I use Claude Code and OpenCode extensively, and especially during the first pass through a codebase that is not well understood the agent often just does \"cat file\" or something similar and gets the entire file in context first, and only then starts doing more finegrained se", "context": "", "use_case": "code search for agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Semble \u2013 Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep"}, {"id": 770818016, "item_id": 48176126, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176126", "by": "cagz", "date": "2026-05-17", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Would be nice to see the actual % token/time saving across end-to-end coding sessions", "excerpt": "Would be nice to see the actual % token/time saving across end-to-end coding sessions over these time periods https://github.com/MinishLab/semble#savings My observation is that greps and the processing of grep outputs account for only a small portion of overall consumption; I haven't measured this scientifically though.", "context": "", "use_case": "Code search for agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Semble \u2013 Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep"}, {"id": 770808032, "item_id": 48175502, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175502", "by": "digitaltrees", "date": "2026-05-17", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Cool project. I built a custome IDE and coding agent harness and will integrate this into it.", "excerpt": "Cool project. I built a custome IDE and coding agent harness and will integrate this into it. If you\u2019re interested in a collaboration, I\u2019d be happy to share revenue to sponsor your open source repo. https://calendly.com/ryanwmartin/open-office-hours", "context": "", "use_case": "Code search for agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Semble \u2013 Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep"}, {"id": 770800400, "item_id": 48175025, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175025", "by": "aadishv", "date": "2026-05-17", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "Clearly a win for Semble for context efficiency, but note that the non-Semble version finished about twice as fast", "excerpt": "Seems like a cool idea so I decided to play with it a bit. The test I ran was in the browsercode (https://github.com/browser-use/browsercode) repo with the following prompt: \"Answer this question by only using the `semble` CLI (docs below): > What tools does Browsercode provide to the agent other than the base OpenCode tools? Provide the exact schema for tool input and tool output and briefly summarize what they do a", "context": "", "use_case": "code search for agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Semble \u2013 Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep"}, {"id": 767296608, "item_id": 47956038, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47956038", "by": "tynanpurdy", "date": "2026-04-29", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I\u2019ve gathered a few here! (On an atproto social bookmarking site :)", "excerpt": "I\u2019ve gathered a few here! (On an atproto social bookmarking site :) https://semble.so/profile/tynanpurdy.com/collections/3m5epi5jubh26", "context": "", "use_case": "Social bookmarking collections", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tangled \u2013 We need a federation of forges"}, {"id": 746843331, "item_id": 46677708, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46677708", "by": "danabramov", "date": "2026-01-19", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "all of these apps work this way", "excerpt": "Yeah, that's what I was trying to say with the article. And this is not theoretical, all of these apps work this way: https://bsky.app/, https://leaflet.pub/, https://tangled.org/, https://semble.so/, https://blento.app/ (new one). It's definitely possible!", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "A Social Filesystem"}, {"id": 733635328, "item_id": 45852208, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45852208", "by": "OneDeuxTriSeiGo", "date": "2025-11-07", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "This is a neat project that I've been following.", "excerpt": "This is a neat project that I've been following. They just opened up the alpha version of their service. It's pretty bare bones but for an alpha it has quite a bit of potential. Related Blogpost: https://notes.cosmik.network/3m52o6mcd6c2z Roadmap: https://github.com/orgs/cosmik-network/projects/1", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Semble \u2013 A social knowledge network for researchers built on ATproto"}]}