Prior art: SDL-MCP (https://github.com/GlitterKill/sdl-mcp) — its "Iris Gate Ladder."
Gap in GitNexus: query/context return bounded slices, but retrieval isn't framed as an explicit budget-aware escalation. An agent gets a slice and either has enough or falls back to reading whole files — there's no cheapest-sufficient ladder.
Proposed feature — a 4-rung graduated retrieval where an agent climbs only as far as it needs:
- Symbol card (~100 tok) — compact per-symbol record: name, signature, kind,
file:line, 1-line summary, key edges. Precomputable at index time.
- Skeleton (~300 tok) — signatures + docstrings, no bodies.
- Hot-path excerpt (~600 tok) — only the matched/targeted lines, not the whole function.
- Full source — policy-gated: agent must supply a reason + expected identifiers + expected line count; denials return next-best-action guidance.
Value: turns "read the file" into a cheapest-sufficient escalation. SDL self-reports 4–20× fewer tokens on signature/shape queries. Attacks the dominant coding-token sink (file reads) while keeping a justified escape hatch to ground truth — the agent is never blocked, just must justify the expensive read. The ~100-tok card is the highest-leverage rung.
Prior art: SDL-MCP (https://github.com/GlitterKill/sdl-mcp) — its "Iris Gate Ladder."
Gap in GitNexus:
query/contextreturn bounded slices, but retrieval isn't framed as an explicit budget-aware escalation. An agent gets a slice and either has enough or falls back to reading whole files — there's no cheapest-sufficient ladder.Proposed feature — a 4-rung graduated retrieval where an agent climbs only as far as it needs:
file:line, 1-line summary, key edges. Precomputable at index time.Value: turns "read the file" into a cheapest-sufficient escalation. SDL self-reports 4–20× fewer tokens on signature/shape queries. Attacks the dominant coding-token sink (file reads) while keeping a justified escape hatch to ground truth — the agent is never blocked, just must justify the expensive read. The ~100-tok card is the highest-leverage rung.