https://arda.pw/tags/developer-tools/Recent content in Developer-Tools on Arda KılıçdağıHugoen-usMon, 13 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0300https://arda.pw/posts/serena-mcp-semantic-code-assistant/Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0300https://arda.pw/posts/serena-mcp-semantic-code-assistant/<p>I&rsquo;ve been recommending Serena to everyone at work for a while, yet somehow never got around to trying it myself. I finally sat down with it on a hobby project - a TypeScript monorepo - and the results were good enough that I wanted to write it up. In short: it makes AI coding tools significantly smarter about your codebase, and it burns noticeably fewer tokens doing it.</p> <h2 id="what-is-serena-mcp"> What is Serena MCP? <a class="heading-link" href="#what-is-serena-mcp"> <i class="fa-solid fa-link" aria-hidden="true" title="Link to heading"></i> <span class="sr-only">Link to heading</span> </a> </h2> <p><a href="https://github.com/oraios/serena" class="external-link" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Serena</a> is an open-source <strong>MCP (Model Context Protocol) server</strong> that gives AI coding assistants IDE-level understanding of your code. Instead of treating your codebase as a pile of text files to grep through, Serena integrates with a <strong>Language Server Protocol (LSP)</strong> backend - the same technology that powers Go-to-Definition, Find All References, and safe renames in your editor. It exposes those capabilities as tools that any MCP-compatible client can call.</p>