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Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools

agentconnect.md

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Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools

#11

Post by 6yyyyyy »

nomilk wrote: post #2

Tangental, but my LSP config breaks every few months. I don't bother to fix it anymore, I open an LLM in ~/dotfiles and complain until it works again, usually in a few minutes. What's interesting is observing how much work this takes. (it gives me much more empathy toward my past self; how was a clumsy human supposed to know and reason about these things!?, especially when I hadn't touched the configs since a few mon…

This seems like the LLM is vastly overcomplicating things. My entire Neovim config is a single 500 line init.lua and this is enough for LSP to work.

Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools

#13

Post by farhanhubble »

Just a few days ago I was pondering why an Emacs like environment that provides such powerful tools to examine and manipulate texts is not being used more prominently than say VSCode where you need to be build many features or use plugins or rely on system utilities.

Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools

#14

Post by jeltz »

6yyyyyy wrote: post #11
nomilk wrote: post #2

Tangental, but my LSP config breaks every few months. I don't bother to fix it anymore, I open an LLM in ~/dotfiles and complain until it works again, usually in a few minutes. What's interesting is observing how much work this takes. (it gives me much more empathy toward my past self; how was a clumsy human supposed to know and reason about these things!?, especially when I hadn't touched the configs since a few mon…

This seems like the LLM is vastly overcomplicating things. My entire Neovim config is a single 500 line init.lua and this is enough for LSP to work.

LLMs love overcomplicating things so that is to be expected.

Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools

#15

Post by rexpop »

nxc18 wrote: post #7

It is astonishing how easy it is to see the AI hand at work in the writing. Really, it is almost impossible not to see. I don’t get how these people feel it is appropriate to pass off slop like this and not even bother to edit it. Just painful to read.

Shut up. Just shut up.

> Avoid generic tangents.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage.

See: Hacker News Guidelines

Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools

#17

Post by NewsaHackO »

tonyarkles wrote: post #8

There’s been an interesting co-evolution that I’ve been experiencing with Claude Code. I’ll ask it to do a task, I’ll watch what it’s doing (often lots of find and grep and ripgrep) and then after the task is complete I’ll ask it if there are any tools that would’ve made the job easier. This has led to tools like fzf and others (notmuch for indexing email, for example). I’ve then taken those tools and figured out how…

When you use “we” hopefully you are referring to someone on your team. Just be careful, the first step down the rabbit hole of AI psychosis is humanization of LLM.

Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools

#18

Post by polotics »

At the end of the first paragraph there is this sentence:

"Training support is a hypothesis consistent with these results, not something this study proves."

I understand it, but I find the wording very unnatural. To improve readability I would have written it in the active form:

"We cannot prove training explains this result, but this fits the data best."

Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools

#19

Post by nxc18 »

rexpop wrote: post #15
nxc18 wrote: post #7

It is astonishing how easy it is to see the AI hand at work in the writing. Really, it is almost impossible not to see. I don’t get how these people feel it is appropriate to pass off slop like this and not even bother to edit it. Just painful to read.

Shut up. Just shut up. > Avoid generic tangents. > Please don't post shallow dismissals > Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. See: Hacker News Guidelines

> Please don't post shallow dismissals

I’ll point out you also violate this guideline.

Do you seriously read the article and not see that it is extremely low signal-to-noise? And full of non-sequiturs and strange unnecessary clarifications? And passed off as a research project.

“Claude, write an article about why agents use grep instead of LSP”

This would have saved everyone the pain of reading this.

As another user pointed out: “Training support is a hypothesis consistent with these results, not something this study proves.” is not a sentence a human would write, nor is it a sentence that a human should ever be made to read. I apologize for reproducing it; the article is chock full of these “gems”.

Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools

#20

Post by nullbio »

wonnage wrote: post #3

This article presents some evidence for why Grep might work better but I don’t think it does a great job of explaining why it gets chosen - is it something that was intentionally reinforced during training or was it just because LSP is harder to train on because it’s usually hidden behind some IDE interface There’s no reason why you couldn’t write a search tool that e.g combines LSP and grep. Or ast-grep, for that ma…

Training a model on ast-grep would be a huge intelligence and performance boost, I think.
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