I built an open-source AI coding agent that indexes your codebase into a knowledge graph before it edits anything

Kushal Banda — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 07:16:48 +0000

Most AI coding agents I tried treat my codebase like a stranger. They read a file when asked, guess at how the pieces connect, and sometimes break something they never understood.

I built Athena to work differently. It builds a real structural graph of your project first: symbols, call paths, dependencies, even dynamic-dispatch hops that grep can't follow. Then when it edits, it knows what depends on what before it touches a file.

A few things about it:
It runs in your terminal as a TUI, not a browser tab or IDE plugin. It works across providers: Anthropic, OpenAI, and more, so you're not locked into one model.

There's an /init command that generates architecture docs for your whole repo, root and per-subdirectory, so both you and the agent start with real context instead of a blank prompt. The whole stack is open source: agent loop, terminal renderer, provider abstraction, session storage. No hosted backend sits between your keystrokes and your files.

I'm one person building this because I hit the same wall over and over with existing tools. Would like feedback, especially from anyone running agents against large or legacy codebases. What breaks for you today?

GitHub: https://github.com/kushalBanda/Athena

DEV Community: Kushal Banda

I built an open-source AI coding agent that indexes your codebase into a knowledge graph before it edits anything