serena/CHANGELOG.md

Latest

Status of the main branch. Changes prior to the next official version change will appear here.

• Language servers:
  • Reliably detect language server termination and propagate the respective error all the way back to the tool application, where an unexpected termination is handled by restarting the language server and subsequently retrying the tool application.

Fixes:

• Ignore .git in check for ignored paths and improve performance of find_all_non_ignored_files
• Fix language server startup issues on Windows when using Claude Code (which was due to default shell reconfiguration imposed by Claude Code)

0.1.3

Summary

This is the first release of Serena to pypi. Since the last release, we have greatly improved stability and performance, as well as extended functionality, improved editing tools and included support for several new languages.

• Reduce the use of asyncio to a minimum, improving stability and reducing the need for workarounds
  • Switch to newly developed fully synchronous LSP library solidlsp (derived from multilspy), removing our fork of multilspy (src/multilspy)
  • Switch from fastapi (which uses asyncio) to Flask in the Serena dashboard
  • The MCP server is the only asyncio-based component now, which resolves cross-component loop contamination, such that process isolation is no longer required. Neither are non-graceful shutdowns on Windows.
• Improved editing tools: The editing logic was simplified and improved, making it more robust.
  • The "minimal indentation" logic was removed, because LLMs did not understand it.
  • The logic for the insertion of empty lines was improved (mostly controlled by the LLM now)
• Add a task queue for the agent, which is executed in a separate and thread and
  • allows the language server to be initialized in the background, making the MCP server respond to requests immediately upon startup,
  • ensures that all tool executions are fully synchronized (executed linearly).
• SearchForPatternTool: Better default, extended parameters and description for restricting the search
• Language support:
  • Better support for C# by switching from omnisharp to Microsoft's official C# language server.
  • Add support for Clojure, Elixir and Terraform. New language servers for C# and typescript.
  • Experimental language server implementations can now be accessed by users through configuring the language field
• Configuration:
  • Add option web_dashboard_open_on_launch (allowing the dashboard to be enabled without opening a browser window)
  • Add options record_tool_usage_stats and token_count_estimator
  • Serena config, modes and contexts can now be adjusted from the user's home directory.
  • Extended CLI to help with configuration
• Dashboard:
  • Displaying tool usage statistics if enabled in the config

Fixes:

• Fix ExecuteShellCommandTool and GetCurrentConfigTool hanging on Windows
• Fix project activation by name via --project not working (was broken in previous release)
• Improve handling of indentation and newlines in symbolic editing tools
• Fix InsertAfterSymbolTool failing for insertions at the end of a file that did not end with a newline
• Fix InsertBeforeSymbolTool inserting in the wrong place in the absence of empty lines above the reference symbol
• Fix ReplaceSymbolBodyTool changing whitespace before/after the symbol
• Fix repository indexing not following links and catch exceptions during indexing, allowing indexing to continue even if unexpected errors occur for individual files.
• Fix ImportError in Ruby language server.
• Fix some issues with gitignore matching and interpreting of regexes in search_for_pattern tool.

2025-06-20

• Overhaul and major improvement of editing tools! This represents a very important change in Serena. Symbols can now be addressed by their name_path (including nested ones) and we introduced a regex-based replaced tools. We tuned the prompts and tested the new editing mechanism. It is much more reliable, flexible, and at the same time uses fewer tokens. The line-replacement tools are disabled by default and deprecated, we will likely remove them soon.
• Better multi-project support and zero-config setup: We significantly simplified the config setup, you no longer need to manually create project.yaml for each project. Project activation is now always available. Any project can now be activated by just asking the LLM to do so and passing the path to a repo.
• Dashboard as web app and possibility to shut down Serena from it (or the old log GUI).
• Possibility to index your project beforehand, accelerating Serena's tools.
• Initial prompt for project supported (has to be added manually for the moment)
• Massive performance improvement of pattern search tool
• Use process isolation to fix stability issues and deadlocks (see #170). This uses separate process for the MCP server, the Serena agent and the dashboard in order to fix asyncio-related issues.

2025-05-24

• Important new feature: configurability of mode and context, allowing better integration in a variety of clients. See corresponding section in readme - Serena can now be integrated in IDE assistants in a more productive way. You can now also do things like switching to one-shot planning mode, ask to plan something (which will create a memory), then switch to interactive editing mode in the next conversation and work through the plan read from the memory.
• Some improvements to prompts.

2025-05-21

Significant improvement in symbol finding!

• Serena core:
  • FindSymbolTool now can look for symbols by specifying paths to them, not just the symbol name
• Language Servers:
  • Fixed gopls initialization
  • Symbols retrieved through the symbol tree or through overview methods now are linked to their parents

2025-05-19

• Serena core:

  • Bugfix in FindSymbolTool (a bug fixed in LS)
  • Fix in ListDirTool: Do not ignore files with extensions not understood by the language server, only skip ignored directories (error introduced in previous version)
  • Merged the two overview tools (for directories and files) into a single one: GetSymbolsOverviewTool
  • One-click setup for Cline enabled
  • SearchForPatternTool can now (optionally) search in the entire project
  • New tool RestartLanguageServerTool for restarting the language server (in case of other sources of editing apart from Serena)
  • Fix CheckOnboardingPerformedTool:
    • Tool description was incompatible with project change
    • Returned result was not as useful as it could be (now added list of memories)

• Language Servers:

  • Add further file extensions considered by the language servers for Python (.pyi), JavaScript (.jsx) and TypeScript (.tsx, .jsx)
  • Updated multilspy, adding support for Kotlin, Dart and C/C++ and several improvements.
  • Added support for PHP

2025-04-07

Breaking Config Changes: make sure to set ignore_all_files_in_gitignore, remove ignore_dirs and (optionally) set ignore_paths in your project configs. See updated config template

• Serena core:
  • New tool: FindReferencingCodeSnippets
  • Adjusted prompt in CreateTextFileTool to prevent writing partial content (see here).
  • FindSymbolTool: allow passing a file for restricting search, not just a directory (Gemini was too dumb to pass directories)
  • Native support for gitignore files for configuring files to be ignored by serena. See also in Language Servers section below.
  • Major Feature: Allow Serena to switch between projects (project activation)
    • Add central Serena configuration in serena_config.yml, which
      • contains the list of available projects
      • allows to configure whether project activation is enabled
      • now contains the GUI logging configuration (project configurations no longer do)
    • Add new tools activate_project and get_active_project
    • Providing a project configuration file in the launch parameters is now optional
• Logging:
  • Improve error reporting in case of initialization failure: open a new GUI log window showing the error or ensure that the existing log window remains visible for some time
• Language Servers:
  • Fix C# language server initialization issue when the project path contains spaces
  • Native support for gitignore in overview, document-tree and find_references operations. This is an important addition, since previously things like venv and node_modules were scanned and were likely responsible for slowness of tools and even server crashes (presumably due to OOM errors).
• Agno:
  • Fix Agno reloading mechanism causing failures when initializing the sqlite memory database #8
  • Fix Serena GUI log window not capturing logs after initialization

2025-04-01

Initial public version