Skip to content

METHODOLOGY.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
146 lines (110 loc) · 6.2 KB

METHODOLOGY.md

File metadata and controls

146 lines (110 loc) · 6.2 KB

Benchmark Methodology

This document provides full methodological detail for the token efficiency benchmarks reported in results.md and the project README.

Scope

The benchmark measures retrieval token efficiency — how many LLM input tokens a code exploration tool consumes compared to reading all source files. It does not measure answer quality, latency, or end-to-end task completion.

Repositories Under Test

All repositories are public and pinned to their default branches at the time of indexing. No filtering or cherry-picking of files was applied beyond jcodemunch's standard skip patterns (node_modules, pycache, etc.).

Repository Files Indexed Symbols Extracted Baseline Tokens
expressjs/express 165 181 137,978
fastapi/fastapi 951 5,325 699,425
gin-gonic/gin 98 1,489 187,018

Query Corpus

Five queries chosen to represent common code exploration intents:

Query Intent
router route handler Core route registration / dispatch
middleware Middleware chaining and execution
error exception Error handling and exception propagation
request response Request/response object definitions
context bind Context creation and parameter binding

These are defined in tasks.json for full reproducibility.

Baseline Definition

Baseline tokens = all indexed source files concatenated and tokenized. This represents the minimum cost for a "read everything first" agent. Real agents typically read files multiple times during a session, so production savings are higher than what the benchmark reports.

jcodemunch Workflow

For each query:

  1. Call search_symbols(query, max_results=5) — returns ranked symbol metadata.
  2. Call get_symbol_source() on the top 3 matching symbol IDs — returns full source code.
  3. Total tokens = search response tokens + 3 x symbol source tokens.

AI summaries were disabled during benchmarking (signature-only fallback).

Token Counting Method

Tokenizer: tiktoken with cl100k_base encoding (used by GPT-4 and compatible with Claude token estimates within ~5%).

Token counts are computed from the serialized JSON response strings, not raw source bytes. This means:

  • JSON field names and structure overhead are included (slightly understates savings).
  • The count is deterministic and reproducible across runs.

Distinction from runtime _meta.tokens_saved

The benchmark uses tiktoken for actual token counting. The runtime _meta.tokens_saved field uses a byte approximation (raw_bytes / 4) for zero-dependency speed. The byte approximation typically agrees within ~20% of tiktoken output for English-language code but can diverge for non-ASCII content or heavily minified files. The _meta envelope includes "estimate_method": "byte_approx" to make this explicit.

Reproducing Results

pip install jcodemunch-mcp tiktoken

# Index the three repos
jcodemunch index_repo expressjs/express
jcodemunch index_repo fastapi/fastapi
jcodemunch index_repo gin-gonic/gin

# Run the benchmark
python benchmarks/harness/run_benchmark.py

# Write to file
python benchmarks/harness/run_benchmark.py --out benchmarks/results.md

The harness script reads tasks.json, runs each query against each repo, counts tokens with tiktoken, and outputs the markdown tables in results.md.

Limitations

  1. Baseline is a lower bound. Real agents re-read files, explore multiple branches, and load documentation. Actual baseline costs are higher.
  2. Query corpus is small. Five queries cannot represent all code exploration patterns. Results for specific use cases may vary.
  3. No quality measurement. The benchmark assumes retrieved symbols are relevant. Retrieval precision is measured separately by jMunchWorkbench.
  4. Single tokenizer. Claude and GPT tokenizers produce slightly different counts for the same input. We use cl100k_base as a common reference point.

Retrieval Precision

Retrieval precision (96% as reported in jMunchWorkbench) is measured by:

  1. Running the same queries against the same repos.
  2. Having a human evaluator judge whether the top-3 retrieved symbols are relevant to the query intent.
  3. Precision = (relevant symbols retrieved) / (total symbols retrieved).

This evaluation is performed by jMunchWorkbench, which runs the same prompt in two modes (baseline vs. jcodemunch) and compares answers, tokens, and latency side-by-side.

Common Misreadings

"The claim is up to 99%." The primary claim is 99.6% average across all 15 task-runs (5,122,105 baseline tokens → 19,406 jCodeMunch tokens). Individual queries reach 99.9% on large repos with tight symbol matches (e.g., error exception on fastapi/fastapi: 99.9%, 801x). The 99.6% aggregate is the honest headline across the current index state (express 165 files, fastapi 951 files, gin 98 files; run 2026-03-28).

"I tested a different repo and got 80%." Results vary by repo structure. Flat script collections (e.g., a repository of hundreds of unrelated standalone scripts) produce lower savings because the symbol index cannot distinguish which script is relevant — the agent still has to scan broadly. The benchmark repos (express, fastapi, gin) are structured application codebases where symbol-based navigation is most effective. Testing a flat script collection and comparing to our benchmark is an apples-to-oranges comparison.

"The benchmark is cherry-picked." The three repos were chosen to represent common backend frameworks across different languages (JavaScript, Python, Go). No file filtering beyond standard skip patterns was applied. The harness (benchmarks/harness/run_benchmark.py) and query corpus (benchmarks/tasks.json) are open source — run them yourself and publish the results.

"The baseline is unrealistic." The baseline intentionally represents the minimum cost for a "read everything" agent — one pass through all files, counted once. Real agents re-read files, branch across sessions, and load documentation. Actual production baseline costs are higher, making our reported savings a conservative lower bound.