github-twin

You reviewed a permission check six months ago. Claude doesn't remember it. github-twin does — it indexes your commits and review comments, and surfaces them as retrieval hits whenever an agent writes or reviews new code in your style.

Try it now from Claude Code — drop this into ~/.claude.json and reload:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "github-twin": { "command": "uvx", "args": ["github-twin", "serve"] }
  }
}

Your code stays on your box. Embeddings are computed locally (Ollama or sentence-transformers); only the LLM seam (gt summarize, gt distill, gt eval) optionally calls a hosted provider, and even that's swappable to local Ollama. The gemini embedder is the one exception — opt-in only.

---

A personal RAG over your GitHub history, served to Claude Code (or any MCP client) as a stdio server. Two scopes, one codebase:

• User mode — index your own commits + review comments. Surfaces your past code as style examples and your past comments as review hints when an agent is writing or reviewing new code.
• Org mode — index a whole GitHub org's files-at-HEAD, commits, and PR reviews across every member. Queries scope by repo, language, or reviewer login.

Retrieval is hybrid (BM25 + vector via RRF), AST-aware via tree-sitter for python/scala/javascript/typescript/go/rust, and contextually enriched at embed time with per-chunk headers + optional LLM-generated summaries.

Install

The fastest path is uvx — no virtualenv to manage, isolated per-tool:

# One-shot
uvx github-twin --help

# Pinned version
uvx github-twin@0.1.0 --help

# With sentence-transformers for the alt embedder
uvx --with 'github-twin[st]' github-twin --help

If you prefer a project-local install:

uv add github-twin            # or: pip install github-twin
gt --help

gt and github-twin are the same Typer app — use whichever fits your muscle memory.

Authenticate

Pick whichever is least friction — github-twin tries them in this order:

1. OAuth device flow (no gh install needed):

   uvx github-twin auth login        # opens browser, persists token
   uvx github-twin auth status       # show which source is active
   

   Token persists in the OS keyring (macOS Keychain / Linux Secret Service / Windows Credential Manager) or, when unavailable, a 0600 file under your data dir.
2. Existing gh CLI: if you've already run gh auth login, gt picks up the token via gh auth token — nothing to do.
3. GITHUB_TOKEN env var: a classic PAT works too; useful for CI / headless / docker. Required scopes: repo, read:org, user:email.

Wire into Claude Code

The MCP server runs over stdio via github-twin serve (or gt serve). Run uvx github-twin auth login once on the box that will host the server.

Option A — via the Claude Code plugin marketplace (lowest-friction):

/plugin marketplace add ChristopherDavenport/christopherdavenport-marketplace
/plugin install github-twin@christopherdavenport

This registers the MCP server entry automatically; set GT_PATHS__DATA_DIR in your environment (or in ~/.claude.json's env block for this server) to point at the DB directory.

Option B — manual wiring: add an entry to ~/.claude.json (or your mcp_servers.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "github-twin": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["github-twin", "serve"],
      "env": {
        "GT_PATHS__DATA_DIR": "/path/to/your/github-twin-data"
      }
    }
  }
}

If you'd rather not persist a token and instead supply it inline (CI, ephemeral container), add "GITHUB_TOKEN": "ghp_..." to that env block; it acts as the lowest-priority fallback.

Restart Claude Code; the find_*, predict_review_outcome, summarize_review_patterns, and sync tools will be available.

Quickstart

Pick a directory to hold the SQLite DB, config, and ingested cache — everything per-data-dir lives under this one root:

export GT_PATHS__DATA_DIR=~/github-twin-data
uvx github-twin auth login                 # one-time OAuth (or set GITHUB_TOKEN)

# user mode (your own GitHub history)
uvx github-twin init                       # discover identity via /user
uvx github-twin sync                       # ingest + summarize + embed
uvx github-twin serve                      # MCP server over stdio

# layer an org into the SAME DB
uvx github-twin init --kind org --org http4s
uvx github-twin sync

# OR keep the org in its own DB by switching data dirs
GT_PATHS__DATA_DIR=~/twin-http4s \
  uvx github-twin init --kind org --org http4s
GT_PATHS__DATA_DIR=~/twin-http4s uvx github-twin sync

gt sync is incremental on subsequent runs.

config.toml lives next to the DB at <data_dir>/config.toml and is created on the first gt init --embed-backend ... call. Default <data_dir> is $XDG_DATA_HOME/github-twin (or ~/.local/share/github-twin) when GT_PATHS__DATA_DIR is unset.

LLM provider matrix

The retrieval surface (find_*, predict_review_outcome) always runs locally on the SQLite index — no API call. LLM calls only happen in three places:

• gt distill — clusters review comments / commits into rules.
• gt summarize — generates per-chunk NL summaries used by the embed-time prefix.
• gt eval reviews / eval predictions — held-out RAG-vs-baseline scoring.

Each picks a backend by precedence Claude → Gemini → Ollama (whichever API key is set), or you can force one explicitly.

Provider	Env var	What it covers
Anthropic (Claude)	ANTHROPIC_API_KEY	Distill / summarize / eval LLM. Best quality.
Google (Gemini, API key)	GEMINI_API_KEY or GOOGLE_API_KEY	Distill / summarize / eval LLM. Free tier is generous.
Google (Gemini, Vertex / ADC)	GT_GEMINI_PROJECT (+ optional GT_GEMINI_LOCATION, default us-central1)	Same backends, but auth via gcloud auth application-default login — no key in your shell. API key wins if both are set.
Ollama (local)	OLLAMA_HOST (default http://127.0.0.1:11434)	Distill / summarize / eval LLM. Fully offline.

The Vertex / ADC path needs the aiplatform.googleapis.com API enabled on your project, and billing applies even for "free" Gemini models — the AI Studio free tier does not extend to Vertex. Project IDs are not secrets; the credential itself lives at ~/.config/gcloud/application_default_credentials.json and is refreshed by gcloud.

Embedder backends

We keep the embedder backend separate from the LLM backend. Choose one:

• Default — Ollama (nomic-embed-text, 768-dim, ~50ms/chunk). Requires a running Ollama daemon. Zero cost, fully local.
• Alternative — sentence-transformers (uv add 'github-twin[st]', pulls torch). Useful when an Ollama daemon isn't available or you want a specific HuggingFace model. Local.
• Alternative — Gemini (gemini-embedding-001 at 3072-dim by default). Uses the google-genai dep that's already installed; auth via GEMINI_API_KEY / GOOGLE_API_KEY, or via GT_GEMINI_PROJECT
  • ADC (gcloud auth application-default login) to route through Vertex AI without managing a key. Remote — this is the only embedder that sends chunk text off-box. Pick it when you have Gemini auth but no Ollama / [st] install, and your corpus is okay to share with Google.

The embedder is a per-DB commitment — sqlite-vec bakes the vector dimension into the table at first creation. Stamp the choice into <data_dir>/config.toml at init time so every subsequent command picks it up:

gt init --embed-backend gemini                              # gemini-embedding-001, 3072
gt init --embed-backend gemini --embed-dim 1536            # request shorter output
gt init --embed-backend sentence_transformers \
        --embed-model BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5 --embed-dim 384

Re-running with the same values is a no-op; running with different values against an existing config.toml fails loud rather than silently changing the corpus. GT_EMBED__* env vars still work for one-off overrides and CI.

A "cloud-LLM only" setup either needs an embedder process (Ollama / [st]) or has to opt into the remote Gemini embedder.

Required GitHub token scopes

When you gt init, the GH client needs:

• repo — private repos and PR comments on them
• user:email — verified email addresses for the user-mode identity sweep
• read:org — org member listing and private org repo discovery

A fine-grained PAT works; classic tokens too.

Retrieval

Hybrid search by default: BM25 (SQLite FTS5) and vector similarity run in parallel, then fuse via Reciprocal Rank Fusion (k=60). The vector leg matches semantic intent; the BM25 leg catches exact identifiers (getUserById, SQLITE_OPEN_READWRITE) that vector search routinely misses. Design reference: Anthropic — Contextual Retrieval.

At embed time, each chunk gets a deterministic header prepended: # path :: symbol_name (node_kind), plus the function's leading docstring/comment when present, plus an optional LLM-generated summary (see gt summarize). The header lets vector queries land on chunks whose bodies only contain identifiers (e.g. natural-language queries against a VaultSecretEq function).

BM25 query expansion is on by default (cfg.retrieval.query_expansion = "rule"), with rule-based code-shaped synonyms applied only to the BM25 leg — embeddings already capture synonymy, so expansion never touches the vector query. Switch to "ollama" to add LLM-generated alternates on top, cached on disk per-token.

predict_review_outcome stays on pure vector retrieval because its inverse-distance vote weighting depends on calibrated L2 distance.

MCP tools

All retrieval tools accept optional repo= and author_login= filters.

Tool	Returns
find_review_comments(diff_hunk, language?, repo?, author_login?, k=5)	Past review comments on diffs similar to the input.
find_style_examples(query, language?, repo?, author_login?, k=5)	Past code chunks matching a description.
find_code(query, language?, repo?, path_glob?, node_kind?, k=5)	Source snippets from files at HEAD (org mode).
find_applicable_rules(query, language?, repo?, author_login?, k=5)	Distilled code-pattern rules relevant to a coding task.
predict_review_outcome(diff_or_summary, language?, repo?, author_login?, k=20)	Weighted prediction over nearest past PRs: {approved, changes_requested, commented}.
summarize_review_patterns(language?, limit=20)	Distilled rules from clustered review comments (run gt distill first).
sync(since?)	Incremental ingest + summarize + embed.

CLI

gt init [--kind user|org|repo] [--org N] [--repo owner/name]
gt repos                                       # list discovered org repos
gt ingest                                      # backfill
gt summarize [--limit N] [--backend ...]       # LLM NL summaries per chunk
gt embed                                       # embed pending chunks
gt sync [--skip-summarize]                     # incremental: ingest → summarize → embed
gt stats                                       # corpus counts
gt distill [--backend ...] [--author ...]      # rule extraction
gt clones prune [--older-than-days N]          # GC the persistent clone cache
gt eval reviews     --since DATE [...]         # held-out RAG-vs-baseline eval
gt eval predictions --since DATE [...]
gt eval search evals/queries/default.yaml      # retrieval-quality dogfood
gt serve                                       # MCP stdio server

Use github-twin <command> interchangeably with gt <command>.

Pluggable backends

Surface	Env / config key	Default	Alt
LLM (cfg.distill.backend, cfg.summarize.backend)	ANTHROPIC_API_KEY / GEMINI_API_KEY (or GT_GEMINI_PROJECT + ADC) / Ollama	auto (cloud > local)	force claude / gemini / ollama
Embedder (cfg.embed.backend)	— / GEMINI_API_KEY (or GT_GEMINI_PROJECT + ADC)	ollama (nomic-embed-text)	sentence_transformers via [st] extra, or gemini (gemini-embedding-001, remote)
Vector store (cfg.vector_store.backend)	—	sqlite-vec (brute-force KNN)	faiss via [faiss] extra
BM25 query expansion (cfg.retrieval.query_expansion)	—	rule (deterministic)	ollama (LLM, cached) or off

All settings are layered: defaults → <data_dir>/config.toml (or the explicit --config PATH) → env vars prefixed GT_ (nested via __, e.g. GT_EMBED__BACKEND=sentence_transformers).

Held-out evaluation

gt eval runs the same prompt with and without retrieval and measures RAG's accuracy lift on real held-out data:

# Review-comment voice match (cosine distance to ground truth)
uvx github-twin eval reviews --since 2025-01-01 --limit 100

# Org-mode: scope to one reviewer (and optionally one repo)
uvx github-twin eval reviews     --since 2025-01-01 --author alice --repo http4s/http4s
uvx github-twin eval predictions --since 2025-01-01 --author alice

# Retrieval-quality dogfood (per-tier, per-backend pass rates)
uvx github-twin eval search evals/queries/default.yaml --mode all

The harness pre-flights eligibility counts so typo'd --author or --repo fail fast without burning LLM calls. The judge embedder defaults to a different model than the retriever (sentence-transformers BGE-small with the [st] extra installed) to avoid measuring how well retrieval clusters its own outputs.

Observability (OpenTelemetry)

Spans for every MCP tool call, every embedder call, and every retrieval leg, exported via OTLP. Auto-detected — nothing fires unless the environment is configured. Specifically:

1. Install the [otel] extra (carries the SDK + HTTP OTLP exporter):

   uvx --with 'github-twin[otel]' github-twin serve
   

2. Point at an OTLP HTTP collector via env vars:

   export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:4318
   export OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=github-twin            # optional
   

OTEL_SDK_DISABLED=true forces it off even when an endpoint is set.

Without [otel] or without an endpoint env var, the code paths still run but every span is a free no-op from opentelemetry-api's built-in tracer. stdout is never used — even with telemetry on — because MCP speaks JSON over stdin/stdout and a stray console exporter would corrupt the channel. The OTLP HTTP exporter posts to your collector; SDK warnings route through Python logging (stderr).

Wired into Claude Code:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "github-twin": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--with", "github-twin[otel]", "github-twin", "serve"],
      "env": {
        "GITHUB_TOKEN": "ghp_...",
        "GT_PATHS__DATA_DIR": "/path/to/twin-data",
        "OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT": "http://localhost:4318",
        "OTEL_SERVICE_NAME": "github-twin"
      }
    }
  }
}

Span names + key attributes you can pivot on:

Span	Useful attributes
mcp.tool.{find_review_comments,find_style_examples,find_code,find_applicable_rules,predict_review_outcome,summarize_review_patterns,sync}	gh_twin.tool.k, gh_twin.filter.*, gh_twin.result.count (or .prediction/.confidence for predict)
embedder.embed	gh_twin.embed.input_chars, gh_twin.embed.model
retrieval.hybrid_search	gh_twin.retrieval.{chunk_kind,k,expander,hits,top_distance}
retrieval.vector_search (predict_review_outcome)	same shape, sans expander

A broken or unreachable collector emits a single Failed to export span batch log line per flush attempt and never propagates into the tool handler — pinned by tests/test_observability.py.

gRPC users: install opentelemetry-exporter-otlp-proto-grpc alongside the [otel] extra and the SDK picks it up automatically based on OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=grpc.

Storage

One DB can hold many targets (user + N orgs + N repos); use a separate GT_PATHS__DATA_DIR per DB when you want them isolated. The resolved data dir is pure with respect to env:

• GT_PATHS__DATA_DIR when set
• else $XDG_DATA_HOME/github-twin/ when XDG_DATA_HOME is set
• else ~/.local/share/github-twin/

The current working directory is never consulted.

Layout — everything per-DB lives under one root:

<data_dir>/
  db.sqlite                  # artifacts + chunks + vectors + FTS5 index
  config.toml                # written by `gt init --embed-backend ...`
  raw/                       # on-disk cache of raw GitHub responses
  clones/                    # persistent shallow clones (if cache_clones=true)
  wiki/                      # `gt wiki export` default output
  auth/token.json            # OAuth file fallback
  query_expansion_cache.sqlite  # only when retrieval.query_expansion=ollama

If you ran an older release that wrote ./config.toml or ./data/ into the current working directory, every CLI invocation logs a one-time WARN with the exact mv command to migrate.

Releasing

Versions come from git tags via hatch-vcs. Cutting a release is one command:

git tag v0.2.0    # PEP 440 forms: v0.2.0, v0.2.0a1, v0.2.0rc1, v0.2.0.post1
git push --tags

The push to a v* tag triggers .github/workflows/release.yml, which:

1. Runs pytest + ruff + uv build across Python 3.12 / 3.13.
2. Publishes the wheel + sdist to PyPI via Trusted Publishing (OIDC). No PyPI token is stored in repo secrets — PyPI verifies the GitHub-signed OIDC token against the Trusted Publisher you register on the project page (workflow filename release.yml, environment pypi).
3. Creates a GitHub Release with auto-generated notes (PRs since the previous tag) and attaches the wheel + sdist. Pre-release tags (a/b/rc) are flagged so they don't replace "Latest".
4. Bumps .claude-plugin/plugin.json on main to match the tag — sets version and pins the MCP server invocation to uvx github-twin@X.Y.Z serve. The marketplace fetches the manifest from HEAD, so this is what users get when their marketplace cache refreshes.

First-time setup, once per repo:

1. Push the project to GitHub (any account / org).
2. Register the Trusted Publisher on PyPI:
   • https://pypi.org/manage/account/publishing/
   • Owner: your GitHub user/org, Repository: github-twin, Workflow: release.yml, Environment: pypi.
   • (Or use the "Pending Publisher" flow if the project doesn't exist on PyPI yet.)
3. On GitHub: Settings → Environments → New environment pypi. Add yourself as a Required Reviewer for an extra approval step before each publish (optional but recommended).

.github/workflows/ci.yml runs on every PR and push to main — the release workflow re-runs the same checks before publishing, so a broken main never produces a release.

Design notes

• Embed-time prefix (embed.prefix.prefix_chunk): per-kind header spliced before each chunk's text at embed time, never written back to chunk.text. Bumps EMBED_TEXT_VERSION whenever the shape changes so the next gt embed re-derives vectors.
• AST chunking (process.chunkers): tree-sitter walks emit chunks per declarable unit; falls back to line-window for unsupported languages or parse failures.
• Asymmetric query expansion (store.query_expansion): BM25 leg only, vector leg always sees the raw embedding — pinned by test_hybrid_search.py.

The original design plan lives in getting_started.md along with the full walkthrough.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

mcp-name: io.github.ChristopherDavenport/github-twin