How helpful is Serena

[gordingin]

LOVE this idea but how helpful is it. I see it running and...... well not sure at this point. I see stuff in the window but just not sure what what happens. I assume that over time, claude code development goes faster but not sure.... I haven't see a difference but hard to tell since my request to CC are different so not sure how to weight this. Is there a dashboard that would tell me what I have seen? saved? token used with and without serena? I am using this correctly, I don't know.
Thanks

[opcode81]

If you are a programmer, then surely you will understand why having (IDE-like) symbolic retrieval and editing capabilities is useful, and you will also understand why this can greatly reduce token usage compared to less sophisticated approaches. It is essentially common sense.

If you are not a programmer and don't know how programmers use IDEs, then there is no simple answer. You would need to understand how programmers work and why having a powerful IDE (with the respective symbolic capabilities) makes all the difference.
As an example, consider the problem of finding out where a function is being called (because you want to change it, for instance). For strongly typed languages, an IDE simply "knows" this and can immediately provide you with all the locations where it is being applied. (Serena provides this sort of functionality.) If you had no such symbolic knowledge, the alternative is to naively search all files for the name of the function, and if it isn't a particularly descriptive name (which occurs in several places), you'd find a lot of actually unrelated content.
You can think of Serena as providing an LLM with an IDE - rather than just a simple text editor.

[MischaPanch]

Pls also have a look at the user's feedback section of the readme and the links there for many examples of people reporting benefits from Serena