alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Mantic.sh – A structural code search engine for AI agents
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
Happy to answer questions!
Comments
Interesting idea but its very strong path-dependence makes me wary on its general use and reliability. E.g. on project's own codebase querying "extract exports" will've expected to get `src/dependency-graph.ts`, which has an `extractExports` function, 1st rather 7th. (Though in out of ~30 total files, that means gives expected result in top 25%.) Trying to search anything on chromium repo (just "git clone https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium", no deps/submodules; only ~44k paths in `git ls-files`) returns "Error: Scanner failed to produce scored files. This is a bug."
Hello! Cool tool, I'm going to give it a try on my personal assistant. The vector DB prices look a bit cynical to me, even incredible. Do you think you could break down how you arrived at the cost estimation both for competing vector DBs and Mantic? For example, I use Weaviate at the moment and I don't come close to this cost even at a years perspective with a generous amount of usage from multiple users (~60)
MANTIC_IGNORE_PATTERNS seems not to be implemented, or am I missing something?
What is "cognitive code search" "without embeddings"? Do you mean you accept natural language queries and create embeddings on-the-fly?
edit: That's structural or syntax-aware search.
I've tried it on my project and it always finds one file: package.json. What languages it support? Only javascript?
Can you explain how you achieve this in more detail? Did not see any in-detail explanation in the readme in repo
Is it possible that you are advertising mantic as an MCP tool without it actually being one? Or at least please document how to use it as such.
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Interesting and I haven't tried it yet.
But the "Usage Guidelines" part of the "License" section at the end of the README says: "License required for: Commercial embedding in products you sell or offering Mantic as a hosted service."
This is not completely true, since it seems that the software is licensed under AGPLv3, which of course allow the use of the software for any purpose, even commercial.