codebase_summarizer

Codebase Summarizer

A command-line tool that extracts a concise summary of a codebase, including symbols and their documentation comments, generating a codebase_summary.md file.

Why?

LLMs charge per-token. When you feed them an entire codebase, you're paying for lines that don't matter. This tool reduces context size by extracting only the essential structure: symbols, their types, and their documentation. The result is a lean summary that lets you understand any codebase in seconds—without the cost of feeding it everything.

Features

• Multi-language support: Go, Rust, Python, Dart, R, TypeScript/JavaScript, Java, C, C++, C#, Ruby, PHP, Swift, Kotlin, and more
• Symbol extraction: Functions, structs, enums, classes, methods, traits, interfaces, type aliases
• Doc comment preservation: Captures documentation comments associated with each symbol
• Markdown output: Clean codebase_summary.md documenting the entire codebase
• AI agent optimized: Generates AGENTS.md with navigation instructions for AI agents

Installation

Build from source

git clone gogs.dmsc.dev/dmsc/codebase_summarizer.git
cd codebase_summarizer
cargo build --release
sudo cp target/release/codebase_summarizer /usr/local/bin/

Usage

# Scan current directory
codebase_summarizer

# Scan a specific directory
codebase_summarizer --directory /path/to/codebase

# Output to custom location
codebase_summarizer --output /tmp/summary.md

# Skip AGENTS.md generation
codebase_summarizer --no-agents

# Enable verbose output
codebase_summarizer --verbose

# Include private symbols
codebase_summarizer --include-all

How it works

1. Scan: Recursively walks the directory, filtering out target/, node_modules/, .git/, and other non-source directories
2. Parse: Extracts symbols from each code file using language-specific parsers
3. Summarize: Generates a codebase_summary.md with file tree and symbol documentation
4. Optional: Creates AGENTS.md with navigation protocol for AI agents