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Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools

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

#41

Post by poytr1 »

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…

I had a similar intuition that we could definitely optimize token efficiency and performance for non-general tasks.

For example, I was handling a lot of infra operations, many of which follow fixed workflows like locating a specific log in certain time range, identify the issue, and apply the appropriate mitigation steps. Since these workflows are entirely command-line based, I added a hook to Claude Code that monitors the commands I repeatedly run, including those invoked by Claude Code itself, and compiles them into reusable scripts(with skills as entries). It can work well.

The takeaway is that we should spend more time reviewing our own work patterns and workflows.

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

#42

Post by szundi »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #17
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.

[dead]

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

#43

Post by szundi »

farhanhubble wrote: post #13

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.

[dead]

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

#44

Post by anilgulecha »

the_duke wrote: post #26

I'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…

Very good tool: I see the go support is not released. Will you be cutting a new release? Will take it for a spin. IMO you can specialize this as a read only AST/search tool, as you said, let models use regular edit tool.

Also some sample commands runs and output, would be useful in the README, for anyone passing by.

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

#45

Post by duskdozer »

kaonashi-tyc-01 wrote: post #36
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.

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.

I think it's extremely unlikely that people who are bothered by LLMisms in writing would be more bothered by human grammar slips.

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

#46

Post by the_duke »

anilgulecha wrote: post #44
the_duke wrote: post #26

I'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…

Very good tool: I see the go support is not released. Will you be cutting a new release? Will take it for a spin. IMO you can specialize this as a read only AST/search tool, as you said, let models use regular edit tool. Also some sample commands runs and output, would be useful in the README, for anyone passing by.

Yeah, I'll do a new release with a whole bunch of local fixes later today.

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

#47

Post by pytonslange »

I wonder if the experiments were done before https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/30948 was closed.

There still seems to be a lot of issues with lsp/pyright, and might contribute to why grep at least gives a more stable and predictable performance (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues?q=is%3Aissu...)

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

#48

Post by kaonashi-tyc-01 »

pytonslange wrote: post #47

I wonder if the experiments were done before https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/30948 was closed. There still seems to be a lot of issues with lsp/pyright, and might contribute to why grep at least gives a more stable and predictable performance ( https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues?q=is%3Aissu... )

it's done before that.

Also, I hope we do experiments for other agents like codex.

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

#49

Post by zby »

Humans don't use command line lsp tools - why should agents use them?

I use lsp when it is integrated in the IDE - but I haven't seen yet any usable command line tools - even if theoretically it would be very useful to type 'lsp-python -replace-function-name foo bar'.

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