Agents don't flail like they used to with shell tools, but there are still weak/blind spots and back-and-forth episodes — especially when using tools in combination/sequence.

So I built "tilth" today. Or rather, AI built it — every line is Opus 4.6. I spent a lot of my precious tokens getting it to "not shit" (at least several of the different vendors' AI overlords assure me it's not shit). It's ~3,900 lines of Rust. I'm positive HN will let me know if its shit after all.

The idea: give agents code-aware reads with a token budget. Read a large file and you get a tree-sitter outline (function signatures, types, imports) instead of the raw text. Drill into specific line ranges when you need detail. Search for a symbol and definitions come first (via AST), ranked by proximity to what you're editing.

  read — structural outline for large files, full content for small ones, line ranges to drill in
  search — symbol (tree-sitter AST), literal text, or regex. Definitions before usages.
  map — codebase overview in one call
  files — glob matching with token estimates, respects .gitignore
  session — tracks what the agent has looked at

To try it:

  cargo install tilth
  tilth map .
  tilth search "your_function_name" .
  tilth read src/main.rs

  tilth install claude-code

-- *tilth* — the state of soil that's been prepared for planting. Good tilth means structured ground where things can take root.

GitHub: https://github.com/jahala/tilth