I’ve had good results with JetBrains AiChat in that really integrates in their IDEs - you can see it using ide tools and i generally found it spends less time thrashing about compared to Claude.
Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools
31–40 of 79 posts
Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools
#32This 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…
I am thinking of where the initial training data came from. For example, Claude Code likely collected a substantial number of real-world coding trajectories through its CLI. However, trajectories involving tools such as LSP, MCP, or AST-grep were probably scarce in the dataset.
This lack of representation may also indirectly limit the effectiveness of subsequently generated synthetic data.
Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools
#33[dead]
Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools
#34I've had great success with a tool I wrote that can print sparse ASTs for code. https://github.com/theduke/smartedit With the skill installed GPT 5.6 usually automatically uses it, and it reduces code exploration time and token usage significantly, for example by just printing the types and functions in a file without bodies, and only expanding when needed. (note: it also has editing functionality, which doesn't work…
This look interesting. I have a large mono repo at working ill got it a go.
Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools
#35It 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
>Shut up. Just shut up.
Try to remain civil, even when you have Big Feelings.
Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools
#36It 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.
The author is not a native speaker. The research topic and methodology are manual, along with the first draft of the article, but he eventually did use AI to make the writing "better". It is either this or grammatical slips here and there, which may annoy the same group of people even more.
Hope this clarifies things.
Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools
#37I've had great success with a tool I wrote that can print sparse ASTs for code. https://github.com/theduke/smartedit With the skill installed GPT 5.6 usually automatically uses it, and it reduces code exploration time and token usage significantly, for example by just printing the types and functions in a file without bodies, and only expanding when needed. (note: it also has editing functionality, which doesn't work…
Interesting tool, it seems that dedicated skills for these tools are important. Even explicit system-prompt instructions—such as “you must use tool X for code exploration”—often fail to behave as expected.
Another tricky part is that how to evaluate customized toolsets properly and ensure they continue to work perfectly as the underlying model/harness evolves.
Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Have you never read human writing before? Humans write all kinds of confusingly worded things all the time - it’s why we have editors even for writers who are the cream of the crop.
But also that sentence is entirely fine as it is to me, it’s pretty simple and clear isn’t it?
Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools
#39There’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…
I wonder if you put job classifications along a spreadsheet's leftmost column (e.g. search in file, search in directory), and data types along a spreadsheet's topmost row (e.g. JSON file, macOS-based filesystem), would you end up finding gaps in the intersection of the columns and rows make these new tools you've created less surprising? For example, to "search a file" on a "macOS-based filesystem", you would natural…
> Or to search the contents of a JSON file, you would maybe use `grep`, or perhaps `jq` and a well crafted query
Re: Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools
#40Just 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.
It's CapEx vs OpEx.