[conradev]

This makes a lot of sense to me through an efficiency lens.

Facebook could spend a lot of money to get engineers beefy workstations, and then have each of these workstations clone the same repository and build the same index locally.

Or, they could leverage the custom built servers in their data centers (which are already more energy-efficient than the laptops), build a single index of the repo, and serve queries on-demand from IDEs throughout the company.

I could also see an analytics angle to this if it could incorporate history and track engineering trends over time. In my experience, decision making in engineering around codebase maintenance is usually rooted in “experience” or “educating guessing” rather than identifying areas of high churn in the codebase or what not.