Ory Lumen: Open Source Local Semantic Search Plugin for Claude Code

Ory Lumen is a Claude Code plugin designed to solve performance issues when working with large codebases. The developer built it after observing that Claude Code takes too long re-reading the same files, sometimes fails to find all files, and degrades in quality with large projects.

How It Works

The plugin indexes your codebase using a code embedding model via Ollama (which is free and fast), then tells Claude Code to use Ory Lumen for semantic code search. It uses SQLite-vec for the vector database functionality.

Development Details

The project was built using Claude Code itself and went through several cycles of fixing performance issues and improving retrieval quality. Claude handled design proposals, implementation, and building the benchmarks. Significant time was invested in improving the TreeSitter and AST parser plus the content chunker. Recent updates include support for efficient git worktree indexing.

Performance and Testing

The developer created a SWE-style benchmark test harness that users can employ to reproduce the results Ory Lumen delivers. In their work, it regularly increases speed versus using vanilla Claude Code, with results that are equal or better in quality.

Availability and Maintenance

The tool is completely free and local-only. The developer is actively maintaining it and encourages users to create issues or submit pull requests.