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Faster for worse results, though. Determining the source of a symbol is not as trivial as finding the same piece of text somewhere else, it should also reliably be able to differentiate among them. What better source for that then the compiler itself?

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Yeah, especially for languages that make heavy use of type inference. There’s nothing you can really grep for most of the time… to really know “who’s using this code” you need to know what the compiler knows.

An LLM can likely approach compiler-level knowledge just from being smart and understanding what it’s reading, but it costs a lot of context to do this. Giving the LLM access to what the compiler knows as an API seems like it’s a huge area for improvement.

It depends on the language and codebase. For something very dynamic like Python it may be the case that grepping finds real references to a symbol that won’t be found by a language server. Also language servers may not work with cross-language interfaces or codegen situations as well as grep.

OTOH for a giant monorepo, grep probably won’t work very well.

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