What is codedb-mcp?

This repository is a Rust-based server that indexes a software codebase and then answers questions about it very quickly. It is designed to plug into AI coding assistants through a protocol called MCP, which lets AI tools call external services as tools during a conversation. The server scans source code files, parses them to understand the structure of functions and classes, builds a graph of how files depend on each other, and creates two types of search indexes. One index handles exact text and regular expression searches. The other handles semantic or meaning-based searches, where you describe what you are looking for in plain terms rather than exact strings. Both indexes work together to return relevant code chunks when queried. The benchmark data in the README shows what this looks like in practice. On a large Unity game client codebase with nearly 19,000 files and over 275,000 symbols, the server answers exact text searches in about 6 milliseconds and semantic searches in under 100 milliseconds. Building the index from scratch takes around 45 seconds, but once built it stays loaded in memory and subsequent queries are fast. Beyond search, the server can list the symbols defined in a file, show which files a given file depends on, find which files import a given file, and export the full dependency graph for further analysis. You can also chain these operations in a single request to reduce round trips when working with an AI assistant. The README compares this tool to a standard text search utility called rg (ripgrep). For raw grep on arbitrary files, rg is still the better choice. This server is intended for repeated code-aware work where an AI needs to understand structure and meaning, not just find text matches. The README is partially truncated, so the full installation and configuration instructions are not visible here.