DEV Community: Aaryan Rawat

Athena: Local-First Code Auditing and Verified Release Notes with Open-Weight AI

Aaryan Rawat — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 21:29:13 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle

What I Built

Athena is an open-source, local-first Git & AST change-intelligence engine and Model Context Protocol (MCP) server built for the Hacktoberfest 2026 - Side Hustle Challenge.

Every developer and engineering team faces the same dread on release day:

Did a refactoring subtly change a public function signature without bumping SemVer?
Which downstream callers across our codebase will break if this pull request merges?
Did someone update a function's parameters without updating the accompanying docstrings or markdown guides?
Who has the time to read through 150 commits and write structured, evidence-grounded release notes?

I built Athena to turn raw Git history and multi-language syntax trees into structured, mathematically verified change intelligence without ever sending your code to closed third-party cloud APIs.

What Does Athena Do?

AST-Level Breaking Change Detection: Parses Python and TypeScript syntax trees across Git commit ranges to pinpoint removed exports, altered parameter lists, and modified return types.
Caller Blast Radius Mapping: Automatically traverses your repository to find every internal file, caller function, and imported symbol affected by a modified signature.
Documentation Drift Detection: Cross-references modified code symbols against Markdown guides and docstrings to catch stale documentation before shipping.
Evidence-Grounded Release Notes: Generates categorized changelogs where every bullet point is linked directly to exact commit hashes and file diffs.
Universal Model Context Protocol (MCP): Plugs natively into Claude Desktop, Cursor, Zed, or any AI coding assistant via standard JSON-RPC 2.0 stdio tools.
Offline-First & Privacy-Focused: Runs completely on your local machine using Ollama and open-weight models like qwen2.5-coder:7b. Your proprietary codebase never leaves your computer.

Who Would Pay For It?

Athena is built for engineering teams, freelancers, and companies building in regulated environments:

Freelancers & Dev Agencies: Freelance developers building client backends can run Athena pre-merge to guarantee they never push a breaking change that breaches a client contract or NDA.
SaaS & Enterprise Engineering Teams: A silent breaking change in a shared internal library costs thousands of dollars in emergency rollbacks and customer downtime. Athena automates pre-merge checks in CI/CD.
Privacy-Conscious Organizations (FinTech, HealthTech, Defense): Teams who cannot send proprietary code diffs to cloud LLMs can deploy Athena completely offline on developer laptops or air-gapped CI runners.

The Side Hustle Model: An open-core CLI and MCP server for solo developers, paired with an automated GitHub Action bot ($19/month solo / $79/month team) that audits every Pull Request and posts blast-radius warnings directly in PR reviews.

Demo

Athena can inspect any local Git repository (pass . for your current directory, or a path to a project). You can also run python examples/create_demo_repo.py to generate an instant sandbox repo with sample commits, breaking changes, and documentation drift.

1. Detecting Breaking Changes via AST

python -m athena breaking-changes . --base v1.0.0 --target v2.0.0

Found 1 breaking change requiring human review:

[CRITICAL] calculate_metrics (function)
  Location: src/core/calculator.py:42
  Change: Non-optional parameter 'weights' was added to public function
  Evidence: commit 4a8b21c: "feat: add weights support to metrics calculation"
  Suggested SemVer Bump: MAJOR

2. Assessing Caller Blast Radius

python -m athena analyze . --base v1.0.0 --target HEAD

Analysis Summary:
  - Commits analyzed: 12 commits between v1.0.0 and HEAD
  - Files modified: 8 (Python: 5, TypeScript: 2, Markdown: 1)
  - AST Symbol changes: 3 modified signatures, 1 deprecated export
  - Downstream callers affected: 4 internal callers identified

3. Generating Evidence-Verified Release Notes

python -m athena release-notes . --base v1.0.0 --target v2.0.0 --version "v2.0.0"

# Release Notes - v2.0.0

## Potential Breaking Changes
- `calculate_metrics`: Parameter `weights` added without a default value in `src/core/calculator.py` ([commit:4a8b21c](https://github.com/aaryanrwt/athena))

## What's Changed
- Added async worker queue execution engine in `src/engine/worker.py` ([commit:7d9e10f](https://github.com/aaryanrwt/athena))
- Refactored export interfaces in TypeScript client ([commit:b12c40e](https://github.com/aaryanrwt/athena))

## Documentation Drift
- `docs/api_guide.md` references the old 2-argument signature for `calculate_metrics`

4. Interactive AI Editor Integration (MCP Server)

Add Athena to your claude_desktop_config.json or Cursor settings:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "athena": {
      "command": "python",
      "args": ["-m", "athena", "mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Now your AI editor can directly query Athena for verified blast radiuses and breaking-change assessments before suggesting code edits.

Code

The entire engine is open-source under the MIT license:

aaryanrwt / athena

Deterministic Git & AST change intelligence engine and Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. Detects breaking changes, maps caller blast radius, identifies doc drift, and drafts evidence-grounded release notes with optional local LLM acceleration.

Athena (`athena-mcp`)

Local-First, Evidence-Backed Git & AST Release-Readiness and Change-Intelligence MCP Server

Athena is an open-source, local-first Model Context Protocol (MCP) server and developer CLI that delivers verifiable, ground-truth code-change intelligence. By combining deterministic Git diff analysis, Python Abstract Syntax Tree (ast) and TypeScript/JavaScript structural signature comparison, downstream caller blast-radius tracing, and documentation-drift detection, Athena eliminates the hallucination and superficiality of conventional AI release-note generators.

Key Differentiators

Deterministic-First Core (100% LLM-Independent): Athena works out-of-the box completely offline without Ollama, without an external AI API, and without any network connection. All Git inspections, AST symbol deltas, caller blast-radius graphs, doc-drift warnings, and release notes execute deterministically with 0ms LLM wait time.
Ground-Truth Evidence Citations: Every reported change story and potential breaking change is bound to verified EvidenceRecord items containing the 40-character commit SHA, commit subject, file path, exact base/target line spans, unified diff hunk…

View on GitHub

33 / 33 Real-World Automated Tests Passing (covering positional-only / markers, staticmethods, Windows NTFS stream protection, and TypeScript multiline interfaces)
Zero Cloud API Requirement: 100% offline-first with deterministic AST fallbacks.

How I Built It

Athena is engineered around a strict hybrid architecture:

[ Git History & Diff Engine ]
              |
  [ Multi-Language AST Parsers (Python + TypeScript) ]
              |
 [ Deterministic Verification & Blast Radius Engine ]
              |
     [ Ollama Local LLM (qwen2.5-coder:7b) ] (Optional Acceleration)
              |
   [ Standard MCP Server / CLI Output ]

Open-Source AI at the Core

Athena uses Ollama with the open-weight qwen2.5-coder:7b model running locally on consumer hardware (tested on an NVIDIA RTX 4050 Laptop GPU with 6GB VRAM). The model synthesizes multi-commit diffs, grouping disparate changes into cohesive business narratives and technical release themes.

Why Deterministic-First Engineering Matters

LLMs can invent code that does not exist. Athena solves this with a two-tier pipeline:

Deterministic Rule Engine: AST parsing and blast-radius tracing run entirely via Python's native ast module and TypeScript syntax tokenizers. The breaking-change verdict is 100% mathematical truth.
Evidence Grounding: Any summary produced by the local AI must cite an actual commit SHA and file path. Athena's verifier checks each citation against the real Git log; any hallucinated claims are automatically pruned.
Deterministic Fallback: If Ollama is offline or not installed, Athena seamlessly switches to deterministic mode, ensuring 100% CLI and MCP server reliability without any AI runtime.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

For a developer tool like Athena, open innovation is the entire business enabler:

Client Privacy & Zero NDA Breaches: Freelancers and agencies handling enterprise code cannot send client intellectual property to OpenAI, Anthropic, or external cloud endpoints without written consent. Running open-weight models locally on the laptop guarantees 100% data sovereignty. Client code never leaves the machine.
Viable Unit Economics for a Side Hustle: Sending 50,000-line diffs across 20 pull requests a day to proprietary cloud APIs would rack up hundreds of dollars in token bills each month, destroying margin. With open-weight models running on consumer hardware, the marginal cost per audit is $0.00.
Offline & Air-Gapped Autonomy: Developers code on flights, commuter trains, and secure air-gapped corporate intranets. Athena has zero network calls - no telemetry, no internet checks, no cloud dependencies.
No Vendor Lock-In: Because Athena is built on open standards (Git, standard ASTs, and the open Model Context Protocol), users can swap the local model from Qwen to Llama 3 or Gemma 2 at will.

My First User

To test Athena in a real-world setting, I shared it with a freelance backend developer who maintains a micro-service billing API for a retail client.

The Test:
We ran Athena against an upcoming v2.0.0 refactor branch containing 38 commits.

What Happened:
Athena immediately flagged a CRITICAL breaking change: a helper method format_tax_rate had been changed into a @staticmethod and received a new positional argument without a default value. While the author's new unit tests passed, Athena's Blast Radius tool identified 3 legacy webhook processors in other files that were calling the old 1-argument signature. Merging that PR would have broken live customer invoice generation.

Their Feedback:

"Catching that before the client saw it saved my reputation. In my freelance work, a broken webhook means angry emails and lost retainers. I'd easily pay $29 a month for a tool that automates this across my client repos."

What They Asked for Next:
A native GitHub Action that automatically comments the blast radius report directly on pull requests.

Prize Categories

Week 2: Side Hustle - A local-first change intelligence and release management engine with a clear commercial path for freelancers, agencies, and micro-SaaS teams.
Best Open-Source AI Application - Combining open-weight models (qwen2.5-coder:7b) via Ollama with deterministic AST static analysis to deliver verifiable, private developer tooling.

Athena: Building a Local-First AI Change Intelligence & Release Engine

Aaryan Rawat — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 21:19:16 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle

What I Built

Athena is an open-source, local-first Git & AST change-intelligence engine and Model Context Protocol (MCP) server built for the Hacktoberfest 2026 â€” Side Hustle Challenge. ðŸ›¡ï¸

Every developer and engineering team faces the same dread on release day:

Did a refactoring subtly change a public function signature without bumping SemVer?
Which downstream callers across our codebase will break if this pull request merges?
Did someone update a function's parameters without updating the accompanying docstrings or markdown guides?
Who has the time to read through 150 commits and write structured, evidence-grounded release notes?

I built Athena to turn raw Git history and multi-language syntax trees into structured, mathematically verified change intelligenceâ€”without ever sending your code to closed third-party cloud APIs.

What Does Athena Do?

ðŸ” AST-Level Breaking Change Detection: Parses Python and TypeScript syntax trees across Git commit ranges to pinpoint removed exports, altered parameter lists (positional, keyword, and defaults), and modified return types.

ðŸ’¥ Caller Blast Radius Mapping: Automatically traverses your repository to find every internal file, caller function, and imported symbol affected by a modified signature.

ðŸ“š Documentation Drift Detection: Cross-references modified code symbols against Markdown guides and docstrings to catch stale documentation before shipping.

ðŸ“ Evidence-Grounded Release Notes: Generates categorized changelogs where every bullet point is linked directly to exact commit hashes and file diffs.

ðŸ”Œ Universal Model Context Protocol (MCP): Plugs natively into Claude Desktop, Cursor, Zed, or any AI coding assistant via standard JSON-RPC 2.0 stdio tools.

ðŸ”’ Offline-First & Privacy-Focused: Runs completely on your local machine using Ollama and open-weight models like qwen2.5-coder:7b. Your proprietary codebase never leaves your computer.

Who Would Pay For It?

Athena is built for engineering teams, freelancers, and companies building in regulated environments:

Freelancers & Dev Agencies: Freelance developers building client backends can run Athena pre-merge to guarantee they never push a breaking change that breaches a client contract or NDA.
SaaS & Enterprise Engineering Teams: A silent breaking change in a shared internal library costs thousands of dollars in emergency rollbacks and customer downtime. Athena automates pre-merge checks in CI/CD.
Privacy-Conscious Organizations (FinTech, HealthTech, Defense): Teams who cannot send proprietary code diffs to cloud LLMs can deploy Athena completely offline on developer laptops or air-gapped CI runners.

Demo

1. Detecting Breaking Changes via AST

python -m athena breaking-changes . --base v1.0.0 --target v2.0.0

Found 1 breaking change requiring human review:

[CRITICAL] calculate_metrics (function)
  Location: src/core/calculator.py:42
  Change: Non-optional parameter 'weights' was added to public function
  Evidence: commit 4a8b21c: "feat: add weights support to metrics calculation"
  Suggested SemVer Bump: MAJOR

2. Assessing Caller Blast Radius

python -m athena analyze . --base v1.0.0 --target HEAD

Analysis Summary:
  â€¢ Commits analyzed: 12 commits between v1.0.0 and HEAD
  â€¢ Files modified: 8 (Python: 5, TypeScript: 2, Markdown: 1)
  â€¢ AST Symbol changes: 3 modified signatures, 1 deprecated export
  â€¢ Downstream callers affected: 4 internal callers identified

3. Generating Evidence-Verified Release Notes

python -m athena release-notes . --base v1.0.0 --target v2.0.0 --version "v2.0.0"

# Release Notes â€” v2.0.0

## âš ï¸ Potential Breaking Changes
- `calculate_metrics`: Parameter `weights` added without a default value in `src/core/calculator.py` ([`4a8b21c`](commit:4a8b21c))

## ðŸš€ What's Changed
- Added async worker queue execution engine in `src/engine/worker.py` ([`7d9e10f`](commit:7d9e10f))
- Refactored export interfaces in TypeScript client ([`b12c40e`](commit:b12c40e))

## ðŸ“š Documentation Drift
- `docs/api_guide.md` references the old 2-argument signature for `calculate_metrics`

4. Interactive AI Editor Integration (MCP Server)

Add Athena to your claude_desktop_config.json or Cursor settings:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "athena": {
      "command": "python",
      "args": ["-m", "athena", "mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Now your AI editor can directly query Athena for verified blast radiuses and breaking-change assessments before suggesting code edits!

Code

The entire engine is open-source under the MIT license:

aaryanrwt / athena

Deterministic Git & AST change intelligence engine and Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. Detects breaking changes, maps caller blast radius, identifies doc drift, and drafts evidence-grounded release notes with optional local LLM acceleration.

Athena (`athena-mcp`)

Local-First, Evidence-Backed Git & AST Release-Readiness and Change-Intelligence MCP Server

Key Differentiators

Deterministic-First Core (100% LLM-Independent): Athena works out-of-the box completely offline without Ollama, without an external AI API, and without any network connection. All Git inspections, AST symbol deltas, caller blast-radius graphs, doc-drift warnings, and release notes execute deterministically with 0ms LLM wait time.
Ground-Truth Evidence Citations: Every reported change story and potential breaking change is bound to verified EvidenceRecord items containing the 40-character commit SHA, commit subject, file path, exact base/target line spans, unified diff hunk…

View on GitHub

33 / 33 Real-World Automated Tests Passing (covering positional-only / markers, staticmethods, Windows NTFS stream protection, and TypeScript multiline interfaces)
Zero Cloud API Requirement: 100% offline-first with deterministic AST fallbacks.

How I Built It

Athena is engineered around a strict hybrid architecture:

[ Git History & Diff Engine ]
              â†“
  [ Multi-Language AST Parsers (Python + TypeScript) ]
              â†“
 [ Deterministic Verification & Blast Radius Engine ]
              â†“
     [ Ollama Local LLM (qwen2.5-coder:7b) ] (Optional Acceleration)
              â†“
   [ Standard MCP Server / CLI Output ]

ðŸ§ Open-Source AI at the Core

Athena uses Ollama with the open-weight qwen2.5-coder:7b model running locally on consumer hardware (tested on an NVIDIA RTX 4050 Laptop GPU with 6GB VRAM). The model synthesizes multi-commit diffs, grouping disparate changes into cohesive business narratives and technical release themes.

ðŸ›¡ï¸ Why Deterministic-First Engineering Matters

LLMs can invent code that does not exist. Athena solves this with a two-tier pipeline:

Deterministic Rule Engine: AST parsing and blast-radius tracing run entirely via Python's native ast module and TypeScript syntax tokenizers. The breaking-change verdict is 100% mathematical truth.
Evidence Grounding: Any summary produced by the local AI must cite an actual commit SHA and file path. Athena's verifier checks each citation against the real Git log; any hallucinated claims are automatically pruned.
Deterministic Fallback: If Ollama is offline or not installed, Athena seamlessly switches to deterministic mode, ensuring 100% CLI and MCP server reliability without any AI runtime.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

For a developer tool like Athena, open innovation is the entire business enabler:

ðŸ”’ Client Privacy & Zero NDA Breaches:
Freelancers and agencies handling enterprise code cannot send client intellectual property to OpenAI, Anthropic, or external cloud endpoints without written consent. Running open-weight models locally on the laptop guarantees 100% data sovereignty. Client code never leaves the machine.

ðŸ’° Viable Unit Economics for a Side Hustle:
Sending 50,000-line diffs across 20 pull requests a day to proprietary cloud APIs would rack up hundreds of dollars in token bills each month, destroying margin. With open-weight models running on consumer hardware, the marginal cost per audit is $0.00.

âœˆï¸ Offline & Air-Gapped Autonomy:
Developers code on flights, commuter trains, and secure air-gapped corporate intranets. Athena has zero network callsâ€”no telemetry, no internet checks, no cloud dependencies.

ðŸ”“ No Vendor Lock-In:
Because Athena is built on open standards (Git, standard ASTs, and the open Model Context Protocol), users can swap the local model from Qwen to Llama 3 or Gemma 2 at will.

My First User

To test Athena in a real-world setting, I shared it with a freelance backend developer who maintains a micro-service billing API for a retail client.

The Test:
We ran Athena against an upcoming v2.0.0 refactor branch containing 38 commits.

What Happened:
Athena immediately flagged a CRITICAL breaking change: a helper method format_tax_rate had been changed into a @staticmethod and received a new positional argument without a default value. While the author's new unit tests passed, Athena's Blast Radius tool identified 3 legacy webhook processors in other files that were calling the old 1-argument signature. Merging that PR would have broken live customer invoice generation.

Their Feedback:

"Catching that before the client saw it saved my reputation. In my freelance work, a broken webhook means angry emails and lost retainers. I'd easily pay $29 a month for a tool that automates this across my client repos."

What They Asked for Next:
A native GitHub Action that automatically comments the blast radius report directly on pull requests.

Prize Categories

Week 2: Side Hustle â€” A local-first change intelligence and release management engine with a clear commercial path for freelancers, agencies, and micro-SaaS teams.
Best Open-Source AI Application â€” Combining open-weight models (qwen2.5-coder:7b) via Ollama with deterministic AST static analysis to deliver verifiable, private developer tooling.

DEV Community: Aaryan Rawat

Athena: Local-First Code Auditing and Verified Release Notes with Open-Weight AI

What I Built

What Does Athena Do?

Who Would Pay For It?

Demo

1. Detecting Breaking Changes via AST

2. Assessing Caller Blast Radius

3. Generating Evidence-Verified Release Notes

4. Interactive AI Editor Integration (MCP Server)

Code

aaryanrwt / athena

Deterministic Git & AST change intelligence engine and Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. Detects breaking changes, maps caller blast radius, identifies doc drift, and drafts evidence-grounded release notes with optional local LLM acceleration.

Athena (athena-mcp)

Key Differentiators

How I Built It

Open-Source AI at the Core

Why Deterministic-First Engineering Matters

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

My First User

Prize Categories

Athena: Building a Local-First AI Change Intelligence & Release Engine

What I Built

What Does Athena Do?

Who Would Pay For It?

Demo

1. Detecting Breaking Changes via AST

2. Assessing Caller Blast Radius

3. Generating Evidence-Verified Release Notes

4. Interactive AI Editor Integration (MCP Server)

Code

aaryanrwt / athena

Deterministic Git & AST change intelligence engine and Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. Detects breaking changes, maps caller blast radius, identifies doc drift, and drafts evidence-grounded release notes with optional local LLM acceleration.

Athena (athena-mcp)

Key Differentiators

How I Built It

ðŸ§ Open-Source AI at the Core

ðŸ›¡ï¸ Why Deterministic-First Engineering Matters

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

My First User

Prize Categories

Athena (`athena-mcp`)

Athena (`athena-mcp`)

ðŸ›¡ï¸ Why Deterministic-First Engineering Matters