ctxrank

A ranked, token-budgeted map of any codebase, built for AI coding agents.

On CPython, ctxrank prints a 2,048-token map of the repo in 1.2 seconds from a cold start and in 0.16 seconds once its cache exists. aider's own repo map took 88 seconds on the same checkout. Dumping all of CPython's source as text would cost 20.6 million tokens.

ctxrank reads every source file with tree-sitter, records where each function, type and macro is defined and where it is used, ranks the definitions with personalised PageRank over that reference graph, and prints the top signatures that fit in the token budget you give it. An agent gets the shape of a repo for a couple of thousand tokens instead of reading files one by one.

The ranking idea comes from aider's repo map. I wanted it outside aider, as one binary any agent can call, fast enough for repos the size of the kernel.

$ ctxrank sym dictresize
Objects/dictobject.c:2206  function  static int dictresize(PyDictObject *mp, uint8_t log2_newsize, int unicode)
Objects/dictobject.c:432  function  static int dictresize(PyDictObject *mp, uint8_t log_newsize, int unicode);

$ ctxrank callers dictresize
Objects/dictobject.c:1899  in insertion_resize
Objects/dictobject.c:3500  in dict_dict_fromkeys
Objects/dictobject.c:3524  in dict_set_fromkeys
...

$ ctxrank map --tokens 120 --query "dict resize"
Lib/multiprocessing/dummy/__init__.py:
⋮
│dict = dict
⋮
Objects/dictobject.c:
⋮
│static int dictresize(PyDictObject *mp, uint8_t log_newsize, int unicode);
⋮
│static int
│dictresize(PyDictObject *mp,
│           uint8_t log2_newsize, int unicode)
⋮

Install

uvx ctxrank            # run without installing (Python wheel with the binary inside)
pip install ctxrank    # or install it
cargo install ctxrank  # or build from source

Prebuilt binaries for Windows, macOS and Linux (x86_64 and arm64) are on the releases page.

Related MCP server: codegraph-mcp

Use it from the command line

Every command takes --json. -C DIR picks the repo, -v prints timings.

Use it from an agent (MCP)

ctxrank mcp is a stdio MCP server with five tools: repo_map, find_symbol, callers, callees and related_files. The index stays in memory and only changed files are reparsed between calls.

Claude Code

claude mcp add ctxrank -- uvx ctxrank mcp

Cursor (.cursor/mcp.json in the project, or ~/.cursor/mcp.json)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ctxrank": { "command": "uvx", "args": ["ctxrank", "mcp"] }
  }
}

Codex CLI (~/.codex/config.toml)

[mcp_servers.ctxrank]
command = "uvx"
args = ["ctxrank", "mcp"]

If you installed the binary directly, use "command": "ctxrank", "args": ["mcp"] instead.

Use it from Python

import ctxrank

print(ctxrank.repo_map(".", tokens=1024, query="token refresh"))
ctxrank.find_symbol("RepoMap", root=".")  # list of dicts

How it works

1. Walk. The ignore crate (the walker ripgrep uses) lists files, honouring .gitignore, .ignore and .ctxrankignore. Files over 1 MB are skipped as generated.

2. Tag. Each file is parsed with its tree-sitter grammar and the grammar's own tags.scm query, the same one GitHub's code navigation uses, in parallel with rayon. For C and C++ I add calls, type uses and macro references, because the upstream C query only has definitions.

3. Cache. Tags go into one binary cache file per repo in your OS cache directory. On the next run only files whose size or mtime changed are parsed again.

4. Rank. Files are nodes. A reference in file A to a name defined in file B is an edge A to B, weighted the way aider weights it (long snake/camel names count more, private _names and names defined in many places count less, sqrt of the reference count). PageRank runs with a personalisation vector built from --focus, --mention and --query, and each file's rank is shared out over the definitions its edges point at.

5. Fit. A binary search picks how many top definitions fit the token budget, then each file is printed with its signatures and the enclosing class or impl lines, with ⋮ for skipped code.

Languages: Rust, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript and TSX, Go, C, C++, Java, C#, Ruby, PHP, Swift, Kotlin, Scala, Lua, Elixir, OCaml, Haskell, Zig and Bash.

Benchmarks

All numbers are from one laptop: AMD Ryzen 9 8940HX (16 cores), 32 GB RAM, NVMe SSD, Windows 11, measured with hyperfine 2.0 (3 cold runs, 10 warm runs). Each run prints a 2,048-token map. "Cold" means no cache, so every file is parsed. "One file changed" touches one source file before each run, so ctxrank reparses that file and reloads the rest from the cache.

aider is version 0.86.2, installed from PyPI with uv pip install aider-chat, and timed with bench/aider_map.py, which calls its RepoMap.get_repo_map the way aider does. On rust-lang/rust it stopped with tree_sitter.QueryError: Invalid node type ... module from one of its bundled tag queries. On Linux I stopped it at the 30 minute cap, with 81,030 of 97,348 files scanned. So the only head-to-head time I have is CPython, where ctxrank is 74 times faster cold. aider also caches its tags, so its warm runs are quicker than its cold one; I did not time those.

Token counts use o200k_base (the GPT-4o tokenizer) through --features exact-tokens. The "whole repo" figure counts every indexed file with a path header and code fences, the way repo dump tools print it.

The 8k map of rust-lang/rust comes out at 8,289 tokens, about 1% over its 8,192 budget, because the default build estimates tokens from byte counts. Build with --features exact-tokens if you need the budget to be exact.

Reproduce with bench/run.sh (needs hyperfine). Raw hyperfine JSON is in bench/results/.

Limits

• Names are matched as text, with no type information. Two unrelated functions called init are the same identifier. As in aider, names defined in more than 5 files count for less. I also ignore names defined in more than 200 files.

• tree-sitter parses C without running the preprocessor, so code hidden behind macros can be missed or misread, and kernel-style headers full of #defines rank high.

• On the Linux kernel a warm run still takes 3.2 seconds. Most of it is loading an 835 MB cache (4 million definitions with their signature text) and rebuilding the symbol table. Smaller repos stay well under half a second. Making the cache smaller is the next thing I want to fix.

• --query matches words against identifiers and paths (with snake_case and camelCase split and crude stemming). There are no embeddings, so a query has to share words with the code.

• I have only benchmarked on Windows so far, so I have no timings from Linux or macOS.

• Map quality is judged by eye. I have not run an evaluation of whether agents finish tasks faster with it.

Credits

The repo-map idea, its weighting heuristics and the output format are from aider by Paul Gauthier (Apache-2.0). ctxrank is a separate implementation in Rust and contains no aider code. Tags queries come from the tree-sitter grammar projects (MIT). See NOTICE.

Licence

Apache-2.0.