Ref - Documentation for your agent
Stop hallucinations by giving your LLM access to up-to-date docs.
What is Ref?
Ref is an up-to-date search index built specifically for crawling and retreiving software documentation to help coding agents be be more accurate.
Is Ref better than normal web search and scraping?
Yes! In a few different ways:
Our crawler is tuned specifically for documentation pages.
Example 1: it will load all the code tabs (eg not just the curl) when reading a page.
Example 2: Ref will return a deep link to a specific spot on a page so it's easy for you to double check the LLM.
We do smart chunking ahead of time so you get just the tokens you need rather than entire pages.
Example: Figma's API is 80k tokens but you probably never need more than 200. Ref will find the right 200.
Ref is fast. Quickly looking up an API param shouldn't be a deep research task.
Example: Ref's p95 latency is 1.7s
And just to be sure Ref is the only MCP server you need for this purpose, Ref also include a fallback read_url and search_web tools if there are URLs or queries to be made outside of traditional documentation.
Does Ref have the documentation I need?
Almost certainly yes! We have 1000s of sites, public Github repos and add more regularly. If you find something missing, you can always email us at hello@ref.tools and we'll add it shortly.
Does Ref support private documentation as well?
Not yet but we're exploring that! If you are interested in joining the beta fill out this form https://tally.so/r/mZKlrA
Server Config
{
"mcpServers": {
"Ref": {
"command": "npx",
"args": [
"ref-tools-mcp@latest"
],
"env": {
"REF_API_KEY": "YOUR_API_KEY"
}
}
}
}