Sverklo

Sverklo is a local-first code-intelligence server designed for code search and analysis within software repositories. 0 license on Zenodo. The platform emphasizes transparency and reproducibility, providing users with the ability to replicate benchmark results locally using a provided harness, input data, and scoring scripts. Sverklo's architecture features an indexing pipeline and hybrid retrieval system that combines BM25, embeddings, and symbol and path channels, with bi-temporal memory tied to git SHAs. The tool exposes a 37-tool MCP (multi-codebase protocol) surface.

The benchmarks included with Sverklo measure tasks such as definition lookup, reference finding, file dependency analysis, and dead code detection across multiple open-source codebases. The first benchmark, bench:primitives, is a deterministic suite of 90 tasks using real-world projects like express, lodash, and sverklo itself, and compares Sverklo against several baselines, including tuned grep variants and other MCP tools. The second, bench:swe, comprises 65 hand-curated research questions across five major open-source projects in two ecosystems, with required-evidence-file scoring. Results are scored on F1, precision, recall, and input tokens. The platform's creators stress the importance of honest benchmarking, publishing both strengths and weaknesses.

Installation is available via npm as a global package, and users can initialize Sverklo in their own projects with a single command, which generates configuration files and verifies the MCP handshake. The tool operates without requiring API keys, cloud connectivity, or telemetry by default, reinforcing its local-first approach. Sverklo is intended for those who require reproducible, offline code analysis and benchmarking, such as developers and researchers evaluating code-intelligence solutions.