Feeding Codebase to LLM Without Crutches 📦

If you're still copy-pasting code one file at a time into the Claude or ChatGPT window, you're not just wasting your time—you're also depriving the model of understanding the relationships within the project architecture.
For proper work with LLMs, the codebase needs to be packaged correctly. Currently, there are two sensible tools for automating this process. They share the same goal but have different philosophies and ecosystems.

🛠 Repomix
Objectively the best tool today. Feeding it a GitHub URL or a local folder is basic functionality. Its real value lies elsewhere:
🟢 XML markup. It packages code into a tree structure of XML tags. If you follow me at the Assembly Point, you know that modern models parse XML markup much more accurately than other formats.
🟢 AST compression. Under the hood, it uses Tree-sitter to parse the syntax tree and can cut out implementation details (function bodies), leaving only interfaces, classes, and signatures. This saves up to 70% of the context window without losing architectural understanding.
🟢 Security Check. Built-in Secretlint will slap your wrists if you try to feed hardcoded keys or passwords into an open-source neural network.
🟢 MCP Server. Works via the Model Context Protocol. AI agents can directly interact with your codebase locally.

🐍 Gitingest
The answer from the Python community. Technically simpler (no AST magic or compression), but it has its own trump cards.
🟡 URL magic. The fastest way to get a dump of someone else's repo. While on GitHub, just change github.com to gitingest.com in the address bar—done, the text is ready to copy-paste.
🟡 Python Native. Installed via pip and called directly from your code. Need to feed a project into a custom RAG pipeline? summary, tree, content = ingest("path") and go.
🟡 Async for Jupyter. Supports await ingest_async(), making it an ideal crutch for analysts and data scientists who never leave their notebooks.

💡 What to choose?
If you need to dissect a large project with a complex structure for refactoring—go with Repomix.
If you're writing your own tooling in Python or need to grab code from GitHub in 3 seconds without a terminal—use Gitingest.

Both tools count tokens, respect your .gitignore, have web versions and browser extensions.

#toolbox