The agent harness performance optimization system. Skills, instincts, memory, security, and research-first development for Claude Code, Codex, Opencode, Cursor and beyond.
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npx n8nAn open-source AI agent that brings the power of Gemini directly into your terminal.
npx @google/gemini-cliSupports Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Mcp
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Prerequisites. Serena is managed by uv, and installing uv is the only required prerequisite.
[!NOTE] When using the language server backend, some additional dependencies may need to be installed to support certain languages; see the Language Support page for details.
Install Serena. Serena is installed via uv as follows:
uv tool install -p 3.13 serena-agent
After successful installation, the command serena should be available in your shell.
Initialise Serena. To initialise Serena and verify that your setup works correctly, simply run:
serena init
By default, this will set up Serena to use the language server backend. To use the JetBrains backend instead, add the parameters -b JetBrains
(see the JetBrains Plugin documentation page for additional usage details).
Either way, you should receive a success message indicating that Serena has been initialised successfully.
Configuring Your Client. To connect Serena to your preferred MCP client, you typically need to configure a launch command in your client. Follow the link for specific instructions on how to set up Serena for Claude Code, Codex, Claude Desktop, MCP-enabled IDEs and other clients (such as local and web-based GUIs).
[!TIP] While getting started quickly is easy, Serena is a powerful toolkit with many configuration options. We highly recommend reading through the user guide to get the most out of Serena.
Specifically, we recommend to read about ...
Serena provides a wide range of tools for efficient code retrieval, editing and refactoring, as well as a memory system for long-lived agent workflows.
Given its large scope, Serena adapts to your needs by offering a multi-layered configuration system.
Serena's retrieval tools allow agents to explore codebases at the symbol level, understanding structure and relationships without reading entire files.
| Capability | Language Servers | JetBrains Plugin |
|---|---|---|
| find symbol | yes | yes |
| symbol overview (file outline) | yes | yes |
| find referencing symbols | yes | yes |
| search in project dependencies | -- | yes |
| type hierarchy | -- | yes |
| find declaration | yes* | yes |
| find implementations | yes** | yes |
| query external projects | yes | yes |
| diagnostics/inspections | yes | yes |
*: Will generally not work for declarations in external dependencies. **: Only available for some languages, limited by the language server functionality.
Without precise refactoring tools, agents are forced to resort to unreliable and expensive search and replace operations.
| Capability | Language Servers | JetBrains Plugin |
|---|---|---|
| rename | yes (only symbols) | yes (symbols, files, directories) |
| move (symbol, file, directory) | -- | yes |
| inline | -- | yes |
| propagate deletions (remove unused code) | -- | yes |
Serena's symbolic editing tools are less error-prone and much more token-efficient than typical alternatives.
| Capability | Language Servers | JetBrains Plugin |
|---|---|---|
| replace symbol body |
| yes |
| yes |
| insert after symbol | yes | yes |
| insert before symbol | yes | yes |
| safe delete | yes | yes |
Exclusive to the JetBrains plugin, Serena supports a highly general debugging tool, which allows an agent to set breakpoints, inspect variables, evaluate expressions and control execution flow via a persistent REPL-style interface.
Beyond its semantic capabilities, Serena includes a set of basic utilities for completeness. When Serena is used inside an agentic harness such as Claude Code or Codex, these tools are typically disabled by default, since the surrounding harness already provides overlapping file, search, and shell capabilities.
search_for_pattern – flexible regex search across the codebasereplace_content – agent-optimised regex-based and literal text replacementlist_dir / find_file – directory listing and file searchread_file – read files or file chunksexecute_shell_command – run shell commands (e.g. builds, tests, linters)A memory system is elemental to long-lived agent workflows, especially when knowledge is to be shared across
sessions, users and projects.
Despite its simplicity, we received positive feedback from many users who tend to combine Serena's memory management system with their
agent's internal system (e.g., AGENTS.md files).
It can easily be disabled if you prefer to use something else.
Active tools, tool descriptions, prompts, language backend details and many other aspects of Serena can be flexibly configured on a per-case basis by simply adjusting a few lines of YAML. To achieve this, Serena offers multiple levels of (composable) configuration: