Serena

• :rocket: Serena is a powerful coding agent toolkit capable of turning an LLM into a fully-featured agent that works directly on your codebase. Unlike most other tools, it is not tied to an LLM, framework or an interface, making it easy to use it in a variety of ways.
• :wrench: Serena provides essential semantic code retrieval and editing tools that are akin to an IDE's capabilities, extracting code entities at the symbol level and exploiting relational structure. When combined with an existing coding agent, these tools greatly enhance (token) efficiency.
• :free: Serena is free & open-source, enhancing the capabilities of LLMs you already have access to free of charge.

You can think of Serena as providing IDE-like tools to your LLM/coding agent. With it, the agent no longer needs to read entire files, perform grep-like searches or basic string replacements to find the right parts of the code and to edit code. Instead, it can use code-centric tools like find_symbol, find_referencing_symbols and insert_after_symbol.

Serena is under active development! See the latest updates, upcoming features, and lessons learned to stay up to date.

[!TIP] The Serena JetBrains plugin has been released!

LLM Integration

Serena provides the necessary tools for coding workflows, but an LLM is required to do the actual work, orchestrating tool use.

In general, Serena can be integrated with an LLM in several ways:

• by using the model context protocol (MCP). Serena provides an MCP server which integrates with
  • Claude Code and Claude Desktop,
  • terminal-based clients like Codex, Gemini-CLI, Qwen3-Coder, rovodev, OpenHands CLI and others,
  • IDEs like VSCode, Cursor or IntelliJ,
  • Extensions like Cline or Roo Code
  • Local clients like OpenWebUI, Jan, Agno and others
• by using mcpo to connect it to ChatGPT or other clients that don't support MCP but do support tool calling via OpenAPI.
• by incorporating Serena's tools into an agent framework of your choice, as illustrated here. Serena's tool implementation is decoupled from the framework-specific code and can thus easily be adapted to any agent framework.

Serena in Action

Demonstration 1: Efficient Operation in Claude Code

A demonstration of Serena efficiently retrieving and editing code within Claude Code, thereby saving tokens and time. Efficient operations are not only useful for saving costs, but also for generally improving the generated code's quality. This effect may be less pronounced in very small projects, but often becomes of crucial importance in larger ones.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ab78ebe0-f77d-43cc-879a-cc399efefd87

Demonstration 2: Serena in Claude Desktop

A demonstration of Serena implementing a small feature for itself (a better log GUI) with Claude Desktop. Note how Serena's tools enable Claude to find and edit the right symbols.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/6eaa9aa1-610d-4723-a2d6-bf1e487ba753

Programming Language Support & Semantic Analysis Capabilities

Serena provides a set of versatile code querying and editing functionalities based on symbolic understanding of the code. Equipped with these capabilities, Serena discovers and edits code just like a seasoned developer making use of an IDE's capabilities would. Serena can efficiently find the right context and do the right thing even in very large and complex projects!

There are two alternative technologies powering these capabilities:

• Language servers implementing the language server Protocol (LSP) — the free/open-source alternative.
• The Serena JetBrains Plugin, which leverages the powerful code analysis and editing capabilities of your JetBrains IDE.

You can choose either of these backends depending on your preferences and requirements.

Language Servers

Serena incorporates a powerful abstraction layer for the integration of language servers that implement the language server protocol (LSP). The underlying language servers are typically open-source projects (like Serena) or at least freely available for use.

With Serena's LSP library, we provide support for over 30 programming languages, including AL, Bash, C#, C/C++, Clojure, Dart, Elixir, Elm, Erlang, Fortran, GLSL, Go, Groovy (partial support), Haskell, HLSL, Java, Javascript, Julia, Kotlin, Lua, Markdown, MATLAB, Nix, OCaml, Perl, PHP, PowerShell, Python, R, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Swift, TOML, TypeScript, WGSL, YAML, and Zig.

[!IMPORTANT] Some language servers require additional dependencies to be installed; see the Language Support page for details.

The Serena JetBrains Plugin

As an alternative to language servers, the Serena JetBrains Plugin leverages the powerful code analysis capabilities of your JetBrains IDE. The plugin naturally supports all programming languages and frameworks that are supported by JetBrains IDEs, including IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, Android Studio, WebStorm, PhpStorm, RubyMine, GoLand, and potentially others (Rider and CLion are unsupported though).

Link to plugins.jetbrains.com

The plugin offers the most robust and most powerful Serena experience. See our documentation page for further details and instructions.

Quick Start

Prerequisites. Serena is managed by uv. If you don’t already have it, you need to install uv before proceeding.

Starting the MCP Server. The easiest way to start the Serena MCP server is by running the latest version from GitHub using uvx. Issue this command to see available options:

uvx --from git+https://github.com/oraios/serena serena start-mcp-server --help

Configuring Your Client. To connect Serena to your preferred MCP client, you typically need to configure a launch command in your client. Follow the link for specific instructions on how to set up Serena for Claude Code, Codex, Claude Desktop, MCP-enabled IDEs and other clients (such as local and web-based GUIs).

[!TIP] While getting started quickly is easy, Serena is a powerful toolkit with many configuration options. We highly recommend reading through the user guide to get the most out of Serena.

Specifically, we recommend to read about ...

• Serena's project-based workflow and
• configuring Serena.

User Guide

Please refer to the user guide for detailed instructions on how to use Serena effectively.

Community Feedback

Most users report that Serena has strong positive effects on the results of their coding agents, even when used within very capable agents like Claude Code. Serena is often described to be a game changer, providing an enormous productivity boost.

Serena excels at navigating and manipulating complex codebases, providing tools that support precise code retrieval and editing in the presence of large, strongly structured codebases. However, when dealing with tasks that involve only very few/small files, you may not benefit from including Serena on top of your existing coding agent. In particular, when writing code from scratch, Serena will not provide much value initially, as the more complex structures that Serena handles more gracefully than simplistic, file-based approaches are yet to be created.

Several videos and blog posts have talked about Serena:

• YouTube:

  • AI Labs
  • Yo Van Eyck
  • JeredBlu

• Blog posts:

  • Serena's Design Principles
  • Serena with Claude Code (in Japanese)
  • Turning Claude Code into a Development Powerhouse

Acknowledgements

Sponsors

We are very grateful to our sponsors who help us drive

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README truncated. View full README on GitHub.