Your AI Coding Agent Wastes 80% of Its Context. Fixed That with Graph Theory.

Dhrupo Nil — Mon, 25 May 2026 13:45:00 +0000

The problem nobody admits

When you give Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex a task like "fix the login validation bug", here's what they usually do:

Run grep -l login src/ → 17 files
Read all 17 files top-to-bottom (because context is "free")
Spend 80% of the model's context window on irrelevant imports, type aliases, and helper functions the bug doesn't touch
Generate a fix using whatever 20% of attention is left

This works. Sort of. But it's wasteful — and on big codebases, it's wrong: the agent runs out of context before it sees the actual buggy function.

The instinct is to throw a bigger model at it. Bigger context window, fancier RAG, vector embeddings. All of which trade real cost for diminishing returns.

There's a better answer that's been sitting in classical CS the whole time: treat the repo as a graph.

The idea, in one paragraph

Your codebase already is a graph. Functions call functions. Modules import modules. Classes extend classes. Pick a node (the symbol your task is about), and the structurally-closest neighborhood is almost certainly what an agent needs to see.

So I built mincut-context — an npm package that:

Parses your repo into a symbol graph (tree-sitter, supports TS/JS/Vue/Python/PHP)
Derives seed nodes from your task description (keyword IDF on symbol names + file paths)
Runs personalized PageRank with the seeds as the restart vector
Picks the minimum-cut subgraph that fits a token budget you choose

The output: a list of files + line ranges that an agent should look at. Nothing more, nothing less.

Show me the numbers

I built an evaluation suite into the repo itself. 28 hand-labeled tasks across 3 real codebases at a 4,000-token budget:

strategy	precision	recall	F1	token-efficiency
mincut	0.27	0.83	0.39	0.270
mincut + `--embed` (semantic)	0.27	0.83	0.39	0.270
grep keyword baseline	0.11	0.42	0.16	0.105
random selection (control)	0.01	0.04	0.01	0.009

Per-repo breakdown:

repo	tasks	mincut recall	grep recall	mincut F1	grep F1
mincut-context (self)	12	0.97	0.56	0.44	0.30
FluentForm (PHP+Vue+JS)	8	0.88	0.13	0.43	0.04
Fluent Player (TS/JSX)	8	0.63	0.56	0.31	0.13

mincut catches ~2× more of the correct files than grep, at ~2.5× better token efficiency. Reproducible with npm run eval. Add your own labeled tasks under eval/fixtures/ to score against your own codebase.

The math, briefly

Given a symbol graph $G = (V, E, w)$ where:

$V$ are code units (functions, classes, methods)
$E$ are dependency edges (imports, calls, references)
$w(v)$ is the token cost of including symbol $v$
$B$ is your token budget
$S \subseteq V$ are seed nodes derived from the task

Find $T \supseteq S$ with $\sum_{v \in T} w(v) \le B$ minimizing the boundary cut cost:

$$\text{cut}(T, V \setminus T) = \sum_{e \in E, \text{ crossing}} w(e)$$

In plain English: pick a connected, low-token region that has few "loose ends" pointing outside it. The inside of the cut is what the agent needs; the outside is safely ignorable.

The objective is submodular, so a greedy algorithm gives a $(1 - 1/e) \approx 0.63$ approximation guarantee. The full pseudocode is in the README; the implementation is ~200 lines in src/core/select.ts.

Three ways to use it

1. As an MCP server — recommended for agents

Drop this block into your Claude Code / Codex / Cursor settings:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mincut-context": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mincut-context", "mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Your agent now has six new tools: pack_context, expand_node, find_callers, find_callees, search_symbols, explain_selection. They operate on the cached graph from the most recent pack_context call — effectively free traversal after the first pack.

2. As a CLI

npm install -g mincut-context

mcx pack "fix the login validation bug" --budget 4000             # plain output
mcx pack "..." --format tree                                       # directory-grouped
mcx pack "..." --format json | jq                                  # pipe to anything
mcx pack "..." --interactive                                       # Ink TUI: vim keys + preview
mcx pack "..." --embed                                             # semantic seeding
mcx pack "..." --cache                                             # 5× warm-run speedup
mcx watch "..." --debounce 300                                     # re-pack on file change
mcx doctor                                                         # environment self-check

mcx doctor is my favorite — it tells you in 6 lines what's installed and what isn't:

3. As a library

import { pack } from 'mincut-context';

const result = await pack({
  task: 'fix the login validation bug',
  repo: process.cwd(),
  budget: 4000,
  cache: true,
  parallel: 4,
  chunk: { enabled: true, maxTokens: 400 },
});

for (const f of result.files) {
  console.log(f.path, f.score.toFixed(3), f.tokens, '·', f.reasons[0]);
}
// → src/auth/login.ts        0.541  612 · seed — matched directly by task
// → src/auth/session.ts      0.408  483 · attached (60%)

What I learned by building this

1. Embeddings are oversold for this problem

Adding semantic embeddings (--embed flag, via @xenova/transformers running locally) did not improve recall on any of my three eval task sets. Why? Because the labels were named honestly. When you label "stripe payment processor" → StripeProcessor.php, the keyword match catches it without help. Embeddings only earn their keep when your task vocabulary diverges from the code's — "centrality and ranking" → PageRank, that kind of gap.

I left --embed in because it doesn't hurt, and there are real users whose mental model doesn't match the code. But the marketing-friendly "AI-powered" framing for this stuff is mostly noise.

2. Greedy beats CELF for this objective

I implemented CELF (Cost-Effective Lazy Forward, Leskovec 2007) hoping for a free speedup over the naive greedy. It diverged — not just slower (8× slower on FluentForm) but wrong: it produced smaller, structurally weaker selections.

Why: our "no isolated nodes" acceptance rule (a candidate must have at least one edge into the current selection) breaks CELF's submodular-monotone assumption. A candidate's eligibility flips discontinuously when a node with an edge to it joins T. The lazy cache becomes unreliable.

I wrote the dead end up in eval/ALGORITHM-RESEARCH.md so nobody re-treads it. Honest negative results are worth shipping.

3. Sub-symbol chunking matters more than I expected

Big legacy codebases have huge functions. A 500-line function is one symbol in the graph, and if it gets selected, the whole thing eats your budget. So --chunk splits big functions at statement boundaries — each chunk becomes its own sub-symbol, individually selectable.

On FluentForm: indexing without chunking → 4,333 symbols. With --chunk → 4,878 symbols (+545 chunks). Same budget, much finer-grained selection. The greedy can pick just the relevant if/for/try block instead of all-or-nothing.

4. Test coverage of 88% isn't the whole story

The CI gates on 85% statements / 80% branches / 90% functions / 85% lines. But the genuinely-untestable files — worker scripts, lazy-loaded LSP clients — are excluded from the calc. Honest reporting means saying what is tested, not just the headline number.

The honest tradeoffs

Honest tradeoff	What we do
True optimal min-cut is NP-hard	Greedy submodular — `(1−1/e)` bound
Tree-sitter symbols are syntactic, not type-aware	`--lsp` refines TS/JS via typescript-language-server
Embedding model adds ~22 MB on first run	Opt-in behind `--embed` flag
LSP startup is slow (~1–5s)	Opt-in; cached after init
Cold start parses whole repo	`--cache` (5× speedup) + `--parallel n` (2.7× speedup)

What I'd build next if you asked

The roadmap that's not checked off yet:

Pyright / Intelephense LSP adapters — type-aware calls for Python and PHP (~1–2 days each on the existing LSP infrastructure)
Svelte / Rust / Go parsers — one file each on the parser template
Incremental neighborhood caching in the greedy — keep attach(v, T) cached and update only when a node with an edge to v is added. Expected 3–5× speedup on graphs with bounded degree.

Each is bounded effort and additive. The core is done.

Stop building, start using

The hardest lesson: a tool's value comes from someone actually using it on real work, not from feature count. mincut-context is at v1.7.0 — 261 tests, 88.6% coverage, CI green on Ubuntu + macOS × Node 18/20/22. There's no honest "but it's not ready" excuse left.

If you've watched an AI agent burn 80% of its 200k-token context on imports it doesn't care about, install it now and tell me what breaks:

npm install -g mincut-context

🔗 GitHub: github.com/dhrupo/mincut-context
📦 npm: npmjs.com/package/mincut-context
📊 Reproducible benchmarks: eval/CROSS-REPO-RESULTS.md

I'd love feedback — especially "your numbers don't replicate on my codebase" feedback. That's literally what the eval suite is for.

If you got value from this, ⭐ the repo or drop a comment about a tooling problem you're solving. mincut-context is open-source MIT; the eval suite welcomes new fixtures.

DEV Community: Dhrupo Nil