# Semble

20 Hacker News commenters recommended Semble and 7 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Developers recommend Semble for fast local code search that needs fewer tokens and queries than grep. Critics question how the token savings are measured.

## Why people recommend it

- Fast indexing and quick results (6 comments): "it blow away my kludged solution particularly given that it doesn't have a lengthy indexing process" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48182190)) "Semble indexes for like 3 seconds and prints out the actual code that runs the model on the CPU." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174927)) "Semble is fast enough that it's not going to be behind." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176604))
- Fewer queries and better context efficiency (4 comments): "you need fewer semble queries to achieve the same outcome, compared to grep+readfile calls" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48171711)) "fewer correction cycles are more valuable than tokens themselves" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177913)) "Clearly a win for Semble for context efficiency" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175025))
- Working well in everyday use (4 comments): "we do believe that Semble makes agents better based on our own experience of using it for the past months while in development" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48189691)) "The results are much better. Even better than my own setup, but, vary a lot." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175777)) "So far our experience is good with Semble" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48189706))
- Finds results grep misses (2 comments): "This seems to work better for the "how does auth work" style of queries" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175368)) "Semble surfaced things grep missed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176235))

## What people warn about

- Token savings baseline questioned (3 comments): "So are we supposed to believe that grep is so wasteful that models are reading 98% useless garbage every time they call it?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176396)) "The savings are calculated against the assumption that agents read the matched files in their entirety." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176075)) "grep doesn't need tokens, so what is 98% fewer than zero?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48171482))
- Setup friction and MCP hangs (2 comments): "codex-cli hangs when calling this through the MCP. The semble process even sticks around as a zombie" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176916)) "require some arcane instructions to coerce Claude Code into compliance" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48529965))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [ripgrep](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ripgrep.md): 122 recommend
- [ast-grep](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ast-grep.md): 21 recommend
- [Graft (Claude Code hooks)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/graft.md): 13 recommend
- [Lat.md](https://hackerapproved.com/p/lat-md.md): 11 recommend
- [Ory Lumen](https://hackerapproved.com/p/lumen.md): 10 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Semble", https://hackerapproved.com/p/semble/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).