it’s interesting to do a follow up where giving an agent both to choose from and comparing accuracy.
Is grep all you need? How agent harnesses reshape agentic search
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Re: Is grep all you need? How agent harnesses reshape agentic search
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft was mostly on the Embrace step. They've reached the Extend step with Copilot. They'll eventually Extinguish grep. It's best not to use Microsoft products.
What does this even mean, how do you extinguish grep
Same way you extinguish _wget_ and other commands, by replacing with an alias [0].
Microsoft had to replace _powershell_ with _pwsh_ because of the anti-consumer aliasing they did. My powershell profile is full of all the commands to remove those aliases.
Last time I check, Microsoft even creates a python alias to bring up their store vs calling the exe in your defined path that was manually installed.
Re: Is grep all you need? How agent harnesses reshape agentic search
#73I have always used traditional grep to search codebases. It serves me better than an IDE when there’re lots of scattered and frequent queries. grep’s design is surprisingly winning, exceeding expectations to this day.
you might be interested in https://github.com/boyter/cs pretty fast and neat project to search code interactively with a lot of optimizations on finding the right thing
The bottleneck, in my case, was indeed the poorly designed GUI of JetBrains and VSCode versus CLI. By migrating to CLI, I have abandoned intelligent queries as well. This project seems like a bridge: it preserves CLI, but restores the queries.
This is a promising road that I would probably not take. I have learned to live with simple per-line regular expressions. I have never felt that they slow me down.
In fact, the opposite is true: they let me craft fuzzy queries clearly, i.e., to balance the fuzziness across the query. I’ve never learned to do that with the black-box intelligent queries, which severely limited my scope in the past.