Generate LLM-ready context from any git repository — in seconds.
gitbrief . --budget 8000 --clipboard # copy to clipboard, ready to paste into Claude/GPT
gitbrief . --format xml # Claude-optimized XML output
gitbrief . --tree --prompt "Review for security" # add directory tree + custom instruction
Every developer using LLMs (Claude, GPT, Gemini) manually copies code into chat windows. You paste some files, forget others, include outdated versions, blow the context window, and guess at what's relevant.
This is wasted engineering time.
gitbrief reads your git history to understand what's actually important right now, then packs the right files into a token-budget-aware document — perfect for pasting into any LLM.
$ gitbrief . --budget 8000 --stats
╭────────────────────────────╮
│ gitbrief allocation stats │
╰────────────────────────────╯
Token budget: 8,000 | Used: 7,999 (100%)
Files included: 6 | Skipped (budget): 194
Git commits analyzed: 100 | Branch: main
Top files by priority:
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ File ┃ Priority ┃ Tokens ┃ Changed? ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ src/auth/middleware.py │ 0.95 │ 432 │ 🔥 │
│ src/auth/tokens.py │ 0.91 │ 318 │ 🔥 │
│ README.md │ 0.83 │ 1,240 │ 🔥 │
│ pyproject.toml │ 0.75 │ 168 │ — │
└───────────────────────────┴──────────┴────────┴──────────┘
Files marked 🔥 were modified in recent commits. The most relevant context surfaces automatically.
| Feature | gitbrief | repomix | llm-ctx | manual |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Git-history-aware ranking | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Token budget control | ✅ | ❌ | partial | ❌ |
| Recency decay scoring | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Recent commits narrative | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Single command | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ |
--clipboard flag |
✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| XML output (Claude-optimized) | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Directory tree in output | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Append custom instruction | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
pip install gitbriefRequires Python 3.10+ and optionally a git repository.
# Basics
gitbrief . # current repo, 32k token budget
gitbrief /path/to/repo # any repo
# Token budget control
gitbrief . --budget 8000 # fits GPT-4 32k
gitbrief . --budget 128000 # Claude 3.5 / GPT-4o full context
# Output
gitbrief . -o context.md # write to file
gitbrief . --clipboard # copy to clipboard (macOS/Linux/Windows)
gitbrief . | pbcopy # macOS: pipe to clipboard
# Format
gitbrief . --format xml # Claude-optimized XML output (uses <documents> structure)
gitbrief . --format markdown # default markdown output
# Filter
gitbrief . --no-tests # skip test files (save tokens)
# Add context for LLM
gitbrief . --tree # include ASCII directory tree
gitbrief . --prompt "Review for security vulnerabilities" # append instruction to context
gitbrief . --tree --prompt "What tests are missing?" --clipboard # combine everything
# Debug
gitbrief . --stats # print allocation table to stderr
gitbrief . --max-commits 200 # analyze more git historygitbrief assigns each file a priority score (0–1):
- Recency (60%): exponential decay — files changed today = 1.0, untouched 6 months = ~0.25
- Frequency (40%): normalized commit frequency across history
- Recency bonus: +0.2 if the file appeared in the most recent 20% of commits
- Type bonuses: README (+0.1), config files (+0.15)
Files are sorted by priority and greedily selected within your token budget.
git clone https://github.com/faw21/gitbrief
cd gitbrief
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest tests/ # 38 tests, 93% coverageMIT
