Show HN: Mantic.sh – A structural code search engine for AI agents

81 points

5 months ago

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

Limitations: Mantic is optimized for precise queries ("find stripe webhook") where structure matters. For fuzzy exploratory search, traditional embeddings may still be better. Curious if HN has ideas for hybrid approaches.

Happy to answer questions!

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