SWELSP: Symbol-Indexed Navigation for Efficient Coding Agents

Coding agents spend substantial token budgets exploring repositories through text searches and code reads. These operations return line-based fragments, often prompting additional queries to identify complete definitions and follow relationships between symbols. Existing approaches reduce this overhead through context pruning or structured navigation, but may introduce additional dependencies, such as auxiliary models or dedicated analysis pipelines. Moreover, providing navigation tools alone does not ensure their effective use within existing agent workflows. We present SWELSP, a symbol-indexed navigation interface that connects Language Server Protocol to agents' established workflows. It augments bash outputs with symbol identifiers that agents can directly use to retrieve definitions and references. Our evaluation shows that SWELSP can reduce API cost by 10.1-21.3% on SWE-bench Multilingual, and 19.8-29.6% on SWE-QA while maintaining task performance on both benchmarks by reducing intermediate searches and windowed code reads of text-based exploration. It also achieves the lowest cost per resolved task against popular open-source tools such as Serena and AiderMap in openhands.