Athena: A Local-First Change Intelligence Engine & MCP Server for Safe Releases

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle What I Built Athena is an open-source, local-first Git & AST change-intelligence engine and Model Context Protocol (MCP) server built for the Hacktoberfest 2026 — Side Hustle Challenge. 🛡️ Every developer and engineering team faces the same dread on release day: Did a refactoring subtly change a public function signature without bumping SemVer? Which downstream callers across our codebase will break if this pull request merges? Did someone update a function's parameters without updating the accompanying docstrings or markdown guides? Who has the time to read through 150 commits and write structured, evidence-grounded release notes? I built Athena to turn raw Git history and multi-language syntax trees into structured, mathematically verified change intelligence—without ever sending your code to closed third-party cloud APIs. What Does Athena Do? 🔍 AST-Level Breaking Change Detection: Parses Python and TypeScript syntax trees across Git commit ranges to pinpoint removed exports, altered parameter lists (positional, keyword, and defaults), and modified return types. 💥 Caller Blast Radius Mapping: Automatically traverses your repository to find every internal file, caller function, and imported symbol affected by a modified signature. 📚 Documentation Drift Detection: Cross-references modified code symbols against Markdown guides and docstrings to catch stale documentation before shipping. 📝 Evidence-Grounded Release Notes: Generates categorized changelogs where every bullet point is linked directly to exact commit hashes and file diffs. 🔌 Universal Model Context Protocol (MCP): Plugs natively into Claude Desktop, Cursor, Zed, or any AI coding assistant via standard JSON-RPC 2.0 stdio tools. 🔒 Offline-First & Privacy-Focused: Runs completely on your local machine using Ollama and open-weight models like qwen2.5-coder:7b. Your proprietary codebase never leaves your computer. Who Would Pay For It? Athena is built for engineering teams, freelancers, and companies building in regulated environments: Freelancers & Dev Agencies: Freelance developers building client backends can run Athena pre-merge to guarantee they never push a breaking change that breaches a client contract or NDA. SaaS & Enterprise Engineering Teams: A silent breaking change in a shared internal library costs thousands of dollars in emergency rollbacks and customer downtime. Athena automates pre-merge checks in CI/CD. Privacy-Conscious Organizations (FinTech, HealthTech, Defense): Teams who cannot send proprietary code diffs to cloud LLMs can deploy Athena completely offline on developer laptops or air-gapped CI runners. The Side Hustle Model: An open-core CLI and MCP server for solo developers, paired with an automated GitHub Action bot ($19/month solo / $79/month team) that audits every Pull Request and posts blast-radius warnings directly in PR reviews. Demo Athena can inspect any local Git repository (pass . for your current directory, or a path to a project). You can also run python examples/create_demo_repo.py to generate an instant sandbox repo with sample commits, breaking changes, and documentation drift. 1. Detecting Breaking Changes via AST bash python -m athena breaking-changes . --base v1.0.0 --target v2.0.0