Dekko

Ever watched your coding agent grep blind through a repo, open three files it didn't need, and burn fifteen thousand tokens just to answer "who calls this function"? That's the problem dekko exists to fix.

This demo runs on dekko's own repo (commit 835733c ) — clone it and run the same three commands yourself.

dekko is a fast, offline, dependency-free static code map generator and codebase indexer for LLM coding agents. It scans a repository with tree-sitter (no model tokens spent parsing) and writes:

• `MAP.md` — a human-readable map: a per-directory overview, an embedded architecture diagram, load-bearing/orchestrator rankings, then every file's functions/methods with signatures, doc lines, and who calls and is called by whom.
• `map.json` — the same graph in machine-readable form.

On top of the map, dekko gives an agent a token-cheap way to answer questions like "what does this file contain," "who calls this function," and "what do I need to safely change this" — without reading whole files. It ships as a CLI, a Claude Code `/map` plugin + MCP server (Model Context Protocol), and works with Cline too.

The result: 10x-300x fewer tokens than a plain Read/Grep workflow on the everyday tasks (orientation, outlining a large file, a symbol's callers), measured across 7 real, unmodified open-source repos on dekko 0.43.77. The floor, a small grep-friendly local symbol, is about 2.5x. The full breakdown is right below.

Why dekko?

Most agent workflows gather context by reading whole files or grepping across a repo — expensive, and it throws away structure (who calls what, what a function's fan-in/fan-out looks like). dekko instead parses the repo once into a call graph and answers targeted questions against it. Measured across 7 real, unmodified open-source repos (Go, TypeScript, Java, Rust, Python/C++ — up to 14k files, 172k symbols) on dekko 0.43.77, dekko's structured queries used 10x–300x fewer tokens than the equivalent Read/Grep workflow for the same task (repo orientation, outlining a large file, tracing a symbol's callers).

dekko's cost stays roughly flat per query while Read/Grep scales with file/repo size, so the ratio grows with scale. It's fast in wall-clock terms too: mapping dekko's own ~4,300-symbol codebase from a cold cache takes about 5 seconds on all cores, an incremental remap after an edit is well under a second, and queries against the resulting map return instantly. The win isn't universal — small, self-contained files and already-grep-friendly local symbols see little benefit (the floor measured was about 2.5x). See benchmarks/real-world-repos/ for the full per-task breakdown, methodology, the original 2026-08 study, and the correctness caveats it raised and how they were closed.

Compared to tag-index tools like ctags/gtags, dekko resolves actual call edges (not just definitions), ranks files by load-bearing-ness, and speaks directly to agents over MCP or the CLI — no editor plugin required.

Install

uv tool install dekko      # or: pip install dekko / pipx install dekko

dekko --claude-install # add the /map command + MCP server to Claude Code, then restart

Extras (dekko[all] for 43 more languages, dekko[search] for embedding search), installing from a local clone, and uninstalling are in docs/install.md.

Quick start

cd my-project

dekko map # writes .dekko/MAP.md + .dekko/map.json dekko summary # ~40-line digest: dirs, hotspots, entry points

.dekko/ is git-ignored by default; the map regenerates on demand, so you rarely need to run dekko map again by hand. If your repo has languages outside the default Tier-1 set (Python, C, C++, JS/TS, Go, Java, Kotlin, Rust), dekko map will say so per file; install dekko[all] for 43 more languages (see Install) and re-run. The list says how well each one is read.

Documentation

• docs/install.md — installation, extras, local clone, uninstall
• docs/cli.md — every CLI command, symbol targets, excluding files, notes, daemon mode, language support
• docs/claude-code.md — the /map plugin, push hooks, Claude Code skills, the MCP server, and Cline

Learn more

• CHANGELOG.md — per-version history
• CONTRIBUTING.md — dev setup, testing, releasing
• benchmarks/ — token-efficiency measurements, including a 7-repo real-world comparison against a plain Read/Grep workflow