archex: local-first, deterministic code-context for AI agents — no API key, no telemetry (Apache 2.0)

The article introduces "archex," a local-first tool that transforms code repositories into a ranked, token-budgeted context bundle for AI coding agents, emphasizing deterministic outputs without the need for API keys or telemetry. It utilizes a retrieval pipeline combining BM25F, local vector embeddings, and a local cross-encoder reranker, achieving a recall of 0.95 and token efficiency of 0.76, outperforming existing solutions like cocoindex-code. This tool is significant for practitioners as it enables reproducible and efficient code context retrieval directly on local hardware, enhancing the development of AI agents without reliance on external services.