ast-outline
A CLI tool that lets AI coding agents pull exactly the code context they need — repo skeleton, file outline, or single symbol — instead of reading whole files.
Tool overview
ast-outline generates a tree-sitter AST outline of a repository, file, or symbol on demand, so that AI agents can request just the structural context they need rather than processing entire source files. This reduces token consumption and speeds up response time for code generation, refactoring, and navigation tasks when using tools like Cursor, Claude Code, or other LLM-powered coding assistants. The tool is stateless and runs locally as a CLI, meaning no external services or API keys are required. It supports multiple languages via tree-sitter grammars and can output a whole-repo skeleton, a single file's outline, or the AST for a specific symbol. This fine-grained context retrieval helps AI agents stay focused and reduces noise from irrelevant code. As a tree-sitter-based tool, ast-outline’s coverage is limited to languages with reliable grammars; niche or proprietary languages may not be supported. The project is still small (33 GitHub stars, 2 forks), so long-term maintenance and community support are uncertain. Users need to install the CLI and integrate it into their AI agent workflows, which may require some setup.