I built a graph-based context tool for Claude Code
I’ve been playing around with Claude Code on larger repos and noticed it spends a lot of time just figuring out where to look before it can start working.
Most tools in this space seem to use semantic search:
- embed files/functions,
- search for similar code,
- send that to the model.
That works sometimes, but I kept hitting cases where the most important code wasn’t semantically similar at all.
Usually it was something connected indirectly:
- a caller,
- shared interface,
- related test,
- sibling implementation,
- dependency chain, etc.
So I started building something different: claude-context-compiler.
Instead of searching over text, it builds a dependency graph of the repo and traverses relationships between symbols.
The traversal changes based on the task:
- bug fixes follow callers/tests
- feature work follows imports and neighboring modules
- refactors widen traversal to understand impact
Another thing I found useful: returning exact symbol ranges instead of entire files.
So instead of giving Claude:
processor.py
it gives:
processor.py:6-24
That alone cuts down a surprising amount of wasted context.
I ran the same task twice with cache cleared between runs.
Without context-compiler:
- $1.41
- 7m 54s
With context-compiler:
- $1.12
- 4m 26s
The interesting part was exploration cost.
Without it, Claude spent about $0.24 just reading files and trying to locate the relevant code.
With context-compiler, that dropped to about $0.0004.
Everything runs locally:
- no cloud indexing
- no telemetry
- no code leaves your machine
Currently supports:
- Python
- TypeScript
Install:
pip install claude-context-compiler
Then inside your repo:
context-compiler init
Open Claude Code in the same folder and it picks it up automatically.
It can also index multiple repos together:
context-compiler init --dependencies ../shared-lib,../frontend
So Claude can follow relationships across repos instead of treating them separately.
Still early, but I’d love feedback from people working on code tooling / agents / retrieval systems.
Source code in comments.