Kodit 0.4: Hosting a SaaS, Smarter APIs, and Scaling the Future
Check out the public SaaS instance! It's the future!
What started as a side-note turned into one of the biggest leaps forward yet.
My vision for Kodit was to help AI coding assistants to search for and provide relevant context from private repositories.
But while marvelling at the traction Context7 has received on Reddit, I realised that there’s much more value up for grabs by indexing public repositories as well. So I planned a small feature in 0.3 to launch a hosted Kodit instance that users can connect to without installing any MCP servers.
It turned out that the act of launching a public service highlighted a variety of scalability challenges in the current implementation. This is fantastic in that it helped me harden Kodit, but it meant that it’s been nearly a month since the last release!
But this does mean that 0.4 is chock-full of juicy features, so let me dive in…
Highlights
Let’s cut to the chase. Here’s an at-a-glance view of what you should take notice of in Kodit 0.4:
Kodit SaaS - Pull in context from public repositories without installing anything
Incremental Indexing - Only changed files are reindexed
Management API - Full REST control over a Kodit server
Streaming HTTP Support - SSE has been deprecated by MCP
Program Slicing - Slightly more sophisticated way of indexing codebases
Getting Started with Kodit SaaS & HTTP Streaming
If you want to see Kodit 0.4 in action, just try it. The hosted version makes it so simple try you almost don’t need any instructions to do it. But just in case, here’s a quick demo.
Browse to the API docs and try using the /search API. Click on the “Try it out” button and paste something like this:
{
"data": {
"type": "search",
"attributes": {
"text": "an mapper that maps an index domain object to a database object"
}
}
}
The results will list the content of the snippet, the relevancy score, a summary of the snippet (which is what you just searched) and some metadata related to where the file can be found. Take a look at the API docs to learn more about how you can use the rest of the API.
Or you can add Kodit to your favourite AI coding assistant by connecting to the public MCP server: https://kodit.helix.ml/mcp
For example, in Claude Code you can execute:
claude mcp add --transport http kodit https://kodit.helix.ml/mcpOr in Cline, add the following settings:
{
"mcpServers": {
"kodit": {
"autoApprove": [],
"disabled": false,
"timeout": 60,
"type": "streamableHttp",
"url": "https://kodit.helix.ml/mcp"
}
}
}Instructions for other AI coding assistants are available in the documentation.
Management API and Enterprise Features
Kodit was initially designed to index the private repositories that exist throughout larger organisations. And our design partners suggested a variety of new features that would make it easier to operate Kodit at scale.
The new REST API allows you to remotely manage a Kodit server from afar. Simple key-based authentication adds a rudimentary access control mechanism.
Plugging the CLI into the API allows users to continue to have the same CLI experience even when working with a remote instance.
And a new cron-based scheduler allows Kodit servers to keep indexes up-to-date.
Core Features
Slightly less exciting, but fundamental to the value of Kodit is the algorithm used to index repositories. Previously, Kodit used a simple query-based selection algorithm that basically just pulled out all methods.
The new program slicer takes this a step further and attempts to identify all dependencies of a method. In results you will see relevant imports, dependent functions and even examples of usage. It’s not perfect and quality might differ between languages because of different language implementations, but it’s a lot better than before.
Talking of languages, Kodit now officially supports the following:
python
java
c
c++
rust
go
javascript
c#
html
css
html and css are particularly interesting because they are obviously markup and design languages, not procedural ones. Defining exactly what constitutes a snippet in these languages is hard and I didn’t spend too much time on it. So if you have any suggestions I’d love to hear from you.
Initial Helix Integration
The deployment of the new Kodit SaaS takes one step towards becoming a part of the Helix family. Since you’re reading this on the Helix blog, you probably already know about Helix.
The eventual goal is to have much tighter integration with Helix, but the first and most obvious integration point is to leverage Helix’s on-premise private architecture to provide embeddings and enrichment.
So you’ll be glad to hear that everything that exists within the Kodit database is powered by Helix. No information is shared with or delegated to third party AI services. It’s all running on our own A100’s.
I did, however, start with Kodit’s parallelism set too high and temporarily both saturated the Helix SaaS and locked myself out due to violating rate limits. To fix this I implemented a new dedicated, socket-based API to communicate with directly with Helix and added greater configuration over the parallelism to give standard Helix SaaS users room to breathe.
Closing
Kodit 0.4 is the strongest yet, but it’s still not reached a scale that I’m happy with. To be truly valuable to public users, Kodit must index at least the top 1000 repositories on Github. This is at least 2 orders of magnitude greater than what exists today and I have no doubt there will be challenges achieving that scale. Kodit 0.5 will concentrate on enabling Github-scale.
Together with Helix’s design partners, we’re also thinking towards Kodit 0.6, where we want to expose important information about fixes and features by indexing issues and pull requests. I also want to index documentation too, to unlock the indexing of private enterprise documentation. This is more challenging due to the different systems involved (Github, Gitlab, Azure DevOps, Jira, and so on). But I feel like it’s achievable.
Help Me Help You
Any open source project lives and dies through support. I’d really appreciate it if you give Kodit a try and let me know about your experience. Kodit’s not quite ready for prime-time public adoption yet, purely because of the lack scale, but it will come soon. In the meantime, now is the right time to address any issues.
Also, if you have any burning AI coding needs that are blocking you from doing what you want to do, that’s just the kind of idea that would be helpful to Kodit.
You can reach out to me at phil@helix.ml or start a discussion.