[PufPufPuf]

The savings are calculated against the assumption that agents read the matched files in their entirety. In my experience, they are smart enough to use grep to bring up a few lines of surrounding context, then read in full only the files that look relevant.

[Bibabomas]

In practice this rarely happens though, at least in practice I rarely see agents "grep -C N" or something like that on files it didn't read yet. I use Claude Code and OpenCode extensively, and especially during the first pass through a codebase that is not well understood the agent often just does "cat file" or something similar and gets the entire file in context first, and only then starts doing more finegrained searches, but at that point you already have a lot of irrelevant context in memory. I think the whole value proposition of semble is that you don't have to do that initial read at all and can instead get the right (small) context bits. If you experience is different, would you mind sharing what your setup is like, e.g. how do you get the agent to read less?