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Launch HN: Nia (YC S25) – Give better context to coding agents

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Re: Launch HN: Nia (YC S25) – Give better context to coding agents

#81

Post by adam_patarino »

jellyotsiro wrote: post #12
6thbit wrote: post #10

This looks neat, we certainly need more ideas and solutions on this space, I work with large codebases daily and the limits on agentic contexts are constantly evident. I've some questions related to how I would consume a tool like this one: How does this fare with codebases that change very frequently? I presume background agents re-indexing changes must become a bottleneck at some point for large or very active team…

great question! For large and active codebases, we avoid full reindexing. Nia tracks diffs and file level changes, so background workers only reindex what actually changed. We are also building “inline agents” that watch pull requests or recent commits and proactively update the index ahead of your agent queries. Local vs upstream divergence is a real scenario. Today Nia prioritizes providing external context to your…

Your FAQ says you don’t store code. But this answer sounds like you do? Even if you’re storing as an embedding that’s still storage. Which is it?

Re: Launch HN: Nia (YC S25) – Give better context to coding agents

#83

Post by jellyotsiro »

adam_patarino wrote: post #81
jellyotsiro wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

great question! For large and active codebases, we avoid full reindexing. Nia tracks diffs and file level changes, so background workers only reindex what actually changed. We are also building “inline agents” that watch pull requests or recent commits and proactively update the index ahead of your agent queries. Local vs upstream divergence is a real scenario. Today Nia prioritizes providing external context to your…

Your FAQ says you don’t store code. But this answer sounds like you do? Even if you’re storing as an embedding that’s still storage. Which is it?

We don’t store your code or any proprietary local content on our servers. When we say “external context” we mean public or user-approved remote sources like docs, packages or APIs. Those are indexed on our side. Your private project code stays local

Re: Launch HN: Nia (YC S25) – Give better context to coding agents

#84

Post by jellyotsiro »

djoldman wrote: post #80

> The calling agent then decides how to use those snippets in its own prompt. To be reductionist, it seems the claimed product value is "better RAG for code." The difficulties with RAG are at least: 1. Chunking: how large and how is the beginning/end of a chunk determined 2. Given the above quote, how much or many RAG results are put into the context? It seems that the API caller makes this decision, but how? I'm cur…

Not quite “better RAG for code”. The core idea is agentic discovery plus semantic search. Instead of static chunks pushed into context, the agent can dynamically traverse docs, follow links, grep for exact identifiers, and request only the relevant pieces on demand.

No manual chunking. We index with multiple strategies (hierarchical docs structure, symbol boundaries, semantic splitting) so the agent can jump into the right part without guessing chunk edges.

Context is selective. The agent retrieves minimal snippets and can fetch more iteratively as it reasons, rather than preloading large chunks. We benchmark this using exact match evaluations on real agent tasks: correctness, reduced hallucination, and fewer round trips.

Re: Launch HN: Nia (YC S25) – Give better context to coding agents

#86

Post by jellyotsiro »

krisgenre wrote: post #79

Is this similar to the indexing done by Jetbrains IDEs?

JetBrains is great at indexing your local codebase and understands it deeply. We don’t try to replace that. Nia focuses on external context: docs, packages, APIs and other remote sources that agents need but your IDE can’t index.

Re: Launch HN: Nia (YC S25) – Give better context to coding agents

#89

Post by jellyotsiro »

bluerooibos wrote: post #88

Can you explain why I would pay almost the full price of Cursor, ChatGPT, or Claude again - just for your context layer, when these companies are already working on context? I don't see you justify this with an explanation of the ROI anywhere.

The economics are simple. When an agent guesses, it produces wrong code, failed runs, and wasted time. External context is the biggest source of those mistakes, because IDEs only index what’s in your repo. We are a complement to Cursor, ChatGPT, and Claude, not a replacement.
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