[vivekraja]

I think the emerging best way is to do "agentic search" over files. If you think about it, Claude Code is quite good at navigating large codebases and finding the required context for a problem.

Further, instead of polluting the context of your main agent, you can run a subagent to do search and retrieve the important bits of information and report back to your main agent. This is what Claude Code does if you use the keyword "explore". It starts a subagent with Haiku which reads ten of thousands of tokens in seconds.

From my experience the only shortcoming of this approach right now is that it's slow, and sometimes haiku misses some details in what it reads. These will get better very soon (in one or two generations, we will likely see opus 4.5 level intelligence at haiku speeds/price). For now, if not missing a detail is important for your usecase, you can give the output from the first subagent to a second one and ask the second one to find important details the first one missed. I've found this additional step to catch most things the first search missed. You can try this for yourself with Claude Code: ask it to create a plan for your spec, and then pass the plan to a second Claude Code session and ask it to find gaps and missing files from the plan.

[nl]

Gemini 3 Flash is very good at the search task (it benchmarks quite close to 3 Pro in coding tasks but is much faster). I believe Amp switch to Gemini Flash for their search agent because it is better.

[esperent]

I very much doubt this. I've been using gemini whenever I get hit by codex limits over the past week. 3 pro is very good - a bit behind codex but still very useful. I've tried 3 flash several times and each time what I got back was complete garbage. After the third or fourth attempt I stopped trying.

[theshrike79]

Gemini the model is good, Gemini the framework around the model is a steaming pile of crap.

[woggy]

Yup. Gemini CLI needs a lot of work.

[esperent]

I actually defended Gemini CLI when someone said this a few days ago. Then Murphy's law hit me with bug after bug, all of which have been reported many times already going back over year or more. I keep having to totally clear out the ~/.gemini folder and then it works again for a while.

[theshrike79]

I'm pretty sure Anthropic is the only company that actually dogfoods their CLI tool.

Gemini seems like an afterthought an intern did, Codex has cool features but none of them align with real-world need.

[theshrike79]

You can also create per-project agents with specific "expertise" in different parts of the code.

Basically they're just few kilobytes of text that's given as extra context to "explore" agents when looking at specific parts of the code.

[atombender]

How does one do this?

I have trouble making Claude even follow CLAUDE.md. Like, it just ignores it, and when it needs to do a task (like testing or running a certain command native to the code base), it does a lot of "find" and "ls" an so on to understand what to run, and frequently runs commands with the wrong flags, badly escaped input etc.

I think Claude could work a lot better (and waste vastly fewer tokens) if it had small bite-size instructions for various tasks ("to run the integration test suite, run "cargo run integration_tests..."), but so far I've been unable to control it.