Itamos MCP Tools

Itamos MCP Tools

Built in Greece, for the world.

Free and open source under AGPL-3.0. Commercial licences for closed-source use.

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The problem

Every LLM coding assistant faces the same wall: codebases are too large to fit in context. The standard response is to dump files — grep for something promising, cat it, hope for the best. At 50k files this breaks. At 240k files it never worked.

We built four tools that give an LLM structured perception of a codebase instead of raw file access, plus a sandboxed git to bring code in. The result is a model that navigates code the way a senior engineer does — starting from the architecture, narrowing to the module, reading only the segment it needs. One call takes it from the project straight to the lines it needs, and every save is checked before it lands.

Read the full paper: docs/PAPER.md: how each tool works, why it was designed that way, and how the hosted sandbox runs, with diagrams.

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Tools

At least 97% fewer tokens than the usual shell workflow (grep, cat, run_cmd), measured against the best case where the model fixes the bug in one attempt. Real sessions save more, because the failed attempts common with raw shell access aren't counted.

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How it works

Session model

Every client gets an isolated workspace. No shared state, no cross-session leakage. Workspaces are wiped after 10 minutes of inactivity.

Navigation: project → file → segment

read_file()                                            → your projects

read_file(path="itsdangerous") → the structure: folders and files with coordinates, no code read_file(path="itsdangerous", segment="d.a.f") → the map of signer.py, one line per segment read_file(path="itsdangerous", segment="d.a.f.31.17") → the code of verify_signature, nothing else

Coordinates: letters are location (folders and files share one sequence per folder), numbers are what is inside a file. d.a.f.31.17 reads as src → itsdangerous → signer.py → segment 31.17. A folder that has never been scanned is scanned on first read; a cloned repository is scanned as soon as the clone finishes.

Nothing is dumped: a structure or file map over ~3,000 tokens returns an overview and asks for a search term instead. search works on both: file and folder names in a project, segment names in a file. trace=true shows what a file connects to, or a project's data flow.

Segments

Files are parsed into named segments. A 5000-line file might have 40 segments; its map is one line per segment, with classes listing their methods. The model reads the map, picks the segment it needs, reads that segment. Total context used is roughly 120 lines instead of 5000.

Editing and verification

One edit at a time, and only on segments the model has read since the last change, so it can never change code it has not looked at. Saving verifies the file first:

L3 checks the content being saved, not an older index, and every save re-indexes the file in every supported language, so the map never lags behind the disk.

web_skeleton token reduction

Raw HTML of a modern web page runs 50,000 to 200,000 tokens. web_skeleton output is 500 to 3,000 tokens. The model reads the skeleton, picks the section id it needs, reads that section only.

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Benchmarks

Verified in live use with Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet. Any MCP-capable model can use the tools.

Don't take our word for it. Test the tools free in the hosted sandbox with your own model and your own repository, then post your results in Discussions → Benchmarks: model, task, tokens, time.

Found a bug? Open an issue with the steps to reproduce it. Every report makes the tools better.

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Connecting

The sandbox server speaks standard MCP over HTTP POST with SSE support.

Compatible with any MCP client. Used in practice through Claude.ai and through direct API integration (our benchmark harness).

Try it in Claude (free live alpha): copy https://mcp.itamos-technologia.com/mcp, open Claude's connector settings, click Add custom connector, paste the address and click Add. A page opens with one button, Create my sandbox: no account, no email. Switch it on in a chat (+ → Connectors) and ask, for example, *"Go to bbc.com/news and tell me the top stories."* In other MCP clients, add the same address as a remote MCP server. Sandboxes are deleted after 10 minutes of inactivity, so don't use them for sensitive data.

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Self-hosting

Requirements

• Linux with ZFS (required). Every sandbox is its own ZFS dataset with a hard size limit (quota) and compression, so no user can fill the disk for everyone else. The server checks this at startup and refuses to start without it.
• Node.js 20 or newer, plus build tools for the native modules (Debian/Ubuntu: apt install build-essential python3).
• git for the git tool, and Chrome or Chromium for web_skeleton.

Install

git clone https://github.com/itamos-technologia/itamos-mcp-tools.git

cd itamos-mcp-tools npm install

One npm install sets up everything, including the tools folder.

On Ubuntu 26.04 you can install the package from Releases instead: sudo apt install ./itamos-mcp-tools_1.1.0_all.deb. It sets up a service user, a systemd service, settings in /etc/itamos-mcp-tools/env and the command itamos-mcp-create-slots, then tells you the next two steps.

Extra language parsers

Besides the standard tree-sitter grammars (installed by npm install), read_file and the segmenter use extra parsers from the grammars/ folder:

The "plus" parsers are the stock grammar plus extra C++ rules, checked to give the identical tree wherever the stock grammar already parses. A parser that is missing or fails to load is skipped, never fatal.

• Linux x64: nothing to do. The parsers ship prebuilt in grammars/tree-sitter-*/prebuilds/linux-x64/ (Node-API, any Node 18+, glibc 2.14+), and npm install sets up the rest.
• Other platforms (macOS, Windows, ARM): compile each parser once. This needs Python and a C/C++ compiler:

  cd grammars/tree-sitter-cuda-plus && npx node-gyp rebuild   # same for tree-sitter-cpp-plus, -metal-plus, -metal

• Drop-in: every grammars/tree-sitter-* folder is a self-contained package. Copy one in and the sandbox finds it by name, with no install or symlink. To keep the grammars somewhere else, set SANDBOX_GRAMMARS_DIR.
• Regenerating (only after changing the rules in grammars/plus/): grammars/plus/build_plus.sh generates with tree-sitter-cli 0.25.10 (ABI 15), compiles, and publishes into the matching tree-sitter-* folder. Its header shows the arguments.

Create the sandbox slots

sudo scripts/create-slots.sh tank/sandboxes 500 2G $USER

This creates slot_001 to slot_500 under the ZFS dataset tank/sandboxes (use your own pool name), each with a 2 GB quota and lz4 compression, owned by the user the server runs as. It is safe to run again.

Start

SANDBOX_ROOT=/tank/sandboxes SANDBOX_TOTAL_SLOTS=500 npm start

From the same machine, add http://localhost:4200/mcp as a connector in your MCP client. Local connections are identified by IP address and need no sign-in.

Going public

Firewall port 4200 and put an HTTPS reverse proxy (for example nginx) in front of it that sets X-Forwarded-For and X-Forwarded-Proto. Requests that arrive through the proxy use the anonymous one-click sign-in, so users on shared addresses (such as claude.ai) each get their own sandbox. Direct connections to port 4200 skip the sign-in, which is why the port must not be reachable from outside.

Text models (optional)

read_file and web_skeleton give untitled paragraphs and page sections a short title (5 to 10 words) from a small summarizer model, so the agent can tell parts apart without reading them. Without a summarizer everything still works; those parts are then named by their first line.

Any OpenAI-compatible chat endpoint works, set with ITAMOS_SUMMARIZER_URL (default http://127.0.0.1:8090): a single llama-server, Ollama, or the included router in front of several GPUs. The whole paragraph is always sent, never cut.

The hosted sandbox runs Gemma 4 E4B (Q4_0) as summarizer and EmbeddingGemma 300M as embedder on three GPUs (one 16 GB MI50 and two 8 GB V340 dies), each summarizer started like this:

llama-server -m gemma-4-E4B-it-Q4_0.gguf -ngl 99 --port 8190 \

-np 64 -c 524288 --kv-unified -fa on --cache-type-k q4_0 --cache-type-v q4_0 -rea off

• --kv-unified: one shared KV pool, so each request uses only the tokens it needs.
• --cache-type-k q4_0 --cache-type-v q4_0 (needs -fa on): a 4-bit KV cache, about 4.5 KB per token for this model.
• -c is the pool in tokens: 524,288 on the MI50, 262,144 on each V340 die (with 32 slots).

The router (router/llm-router.js, service itamos-llm-router) listens on 8090 (summarizer) and 8091 (embedder). Before sending a request it counts its tokens with the backend's own tokenizer, sends it to a GPU whose pool has room (preferring faster GPUs by weight), and makes it wait in line when none has. A GPU that fails is skipped for 15 seconds and the request is retried on another. Configure it with ROUTES (in the package: /etc/itamos-mcp-tools/router.env); GET /router/status shows each GPU's pool, reserved