Probe - AI Developer Tools Tool

Overview

Probe is an open-source, AI-friendly semantic code search engine built to operate fully locally and scale to large repositories. It combines ripgrep-powered file scanning with tree-sitter AST parsing to return complete code blocks (functions, classes, structs) rather than isolated lines, making search results directly usable as context for LLMs and other AI tools. According to the project README, Probe supports advanced re-ranking (BM25, TF‑IDF, hybrid) and file/AST query filters to prioritize the most relevant blocks for a query. ([github.com](https://github.com/buger/probe)) Beyond CLI search and extraction, Probe provides an MCP server mode and a web/chat interface that can run via npx or Docker. The project is distributed as native binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows, published npm wrappers, and (as of v0.6.0) a crates.io Rust library for embedding Probe programmatically. The v0.6.0 release also introduced an implement tool that allows AI assistants to propose and apply code edits when allowed, expanded Docker images, and added OpenTelemetry tracing for observability. These changes position Probe as both a local search engine and a building block for AI-driven developer workflows. ([probelabs.com](https://probelabs.com/?utm_source=openai))

Installation

Install via npm:

npm install -g @probelabs/probe

npx -y @probelabs/probe-chat --web

docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/workspace buger/probe search "function" /workspace

probe search "<SEARCH_PATTERN>" ./ --max-tokens 10000

Key Features

• Extracts complete AST nodes (functions, classes, structs) so AI gets full code context.
• Fast repository scanning using ripgrep integration for low-latency searches in large codebases.
• Tree-sitter parsing to identify and extract precise code blocks, not just matching lines.
• Pluggable re-rankers: BM25, TF‑IDF, hybrid ranking to surface most relevant code blocks.
• AI implement tool (v0.6.0) enables context-aware code edits by assistants when allow_edit is enabled.

Community

Probe is an Apache‑2.0 open-source project with an active GitHub repository (≈416 stars, ≈35 forks, issues and discussions for support). According to the repository and project site, users can run Probe locally via npm, npx, or Docker and join the project's Discord for community support. The maintainers publish releases with multi-platform binaries and have published a crates.io package and npm wrappers; the npm organization shows migration from @buger/* to @probelabs/* packages. For details and latest releases see the GitHub README and project blog. ([github.com](https://github.com/buger/probe))

Key Information

• Category: Developer Tools
• Type: AI Developer Tools Tool