Merlin Community

Local-first dedup for LLM context. Lite engine, MIT integrations, papers on arXiv.

We measured 22 % chunk-level dedup on a typical 5 MB agent session and up to 71 % on RAG pipelines. That's wasted input you're already paying for.

This repo is the community edition: a lite engine + integrations (MCP server, VSCode extension, Claude Code hook). The enterprise C++ engine (multi-threaded, lock-free, sustained GB/s on production hardware) is a separate proprietary product.

If this saves you time: ⭐ star this repo — stars are the only signal we get since
we collect zero telemetry. Questions or interested in Pro? There's a contact form
at corbenic.ai.

Quick start

curl -LO https://github.com/corbenicai/merlin-community/releases/latest/download/merlin-community.zip
unzip merlin-community.zip && cd merlin-community
python shared/install_helpers.py claude_desktop enable

Three commands. Restart your AI tool. Done. (Other supported: claude_code, openclaw. VSCode extension: code --install-extension vscode/merlin-savings-0.1.0.vsix.)

Why no automatic Copilot interception

Because Copilot uses a closed API and we refuse to install a root CA cert for HTTPS MITM on your machine. Other tools do. We don't. For Copilot users we ship a manual Merlin: Dedupe Selection command. Two extra clicks beats opaque interception.

What you get

• Live $ saved statusbar in VSCode (auto-detects your model from each tool's own config — Claude Code's, Copilot's, etc.)
• MCP tools (merlin_dedupe, merlin_savings_summary) for Claude Desktop / Claude Code / OpenClaw
• Cross-platform install scripts with backup-before-edit and one-line rollback
• One shared ledger (~/.merlin/savings_ledger.jsonl) aggregating savings from all integrations

What's in the Pro tier

The community edition ships a simpler dedup implementation that runs single-threaded — fast enough for most individual workloads. The Pro tier adds the multi-threaded C++ engine for sustained high-throughput workloads, plus server-side validation for teams that need it. Reach out via corbenic.ai if that fits your use case.

Community caps

50 MB per run · 200 MB per day · 2 GB per month. A hobbyist never hits these. A serious commercial pipeline hits them in 2–3 days — for Pro tier, reach out via corbenic.ai.

Status

v0.1.2 is live. The Windows x64 binary is attached to the latest release. Linux + macOS builds follow. Integration code is tested (37 / 37).

Issues

File at github.com/corbenicai/merlin-community/issues. We respond within 48 h during European business hours; faster during the launch window.

If install broke something: python shared/merlin_restore_backup.py <integration>. Every install script makes a timestamped backup before touching configs.

Papers:

• arXiv:2605.09611
• arXiv:2605.09990

Zenodo DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20090991. Contact: [email protected] · [email protected] · [email protected].