serena_skill

Overview

This skill provides IDE-like semantic code understanding and symbol-level operations for large codebases. It prioritizes Serena's symbolic tools for finding, renaming, refactoring, and tracking cross-file references. It also maintains project memory and session persistence to store high-level project knowledge. Use it when you need precise, language-aware navigation and safe refactoring across many files.

How this skill works

Serena parses the project to build a symbol index and exposes CLI commands to find symbols, view symbol bodies, list references, and perform semantic edits like replace or rename. It stores persistent project memories (notes, architecture context) and provides file-oriented helpers only when appropriate. The toolset is optimized for multi-language projects and for workflows where symbol-level operations are safer and more precise than text grep or bulk edits.

When to use it

• Analyzing large codebases (>50 files) for architecture or impact analysis
• Finding or inspecting a symbol’s implementation across files
• Renaming or refactoring symbols with cross-file reference updates
• Tracking references and usages before making changes
• Keeping project context or notes in persistent memory during a session

Best practices

• Prefer symbol commands (find, refs, rename, replace) over raw text search for code tasks
• Run symbol refs before edits to perform impact analysis and avoid regressions
• Write concise memories for architecture, APIs, and decisions to speed future analysis
• Limit file-level text search to non-code artifacts (docs, configs)
• Validate changes with tests and run a quick build or test command via cmd run after refactors

Example use cases

• Locate all implementations and overloads of a class or function across the repo using symbol find and symbol refs
• Safely rename a function with symbol rename to update all cross-file references
• Inspect a file’s symbol list with symbol overview to understand a module’s structure
• Store and recall project notes like API decisions using memory write/read for onboarding
• Replace or insert method bodies semantically with symbol replace or insert-after to keep edits accurate