[majormajor]

I think if the dream of semantic search from vector embeddings had worked out as well as people had hoped then "grep over a bunch of text" would have some significant disadvantages.

But in practice I never saw anyone crack the embedding-generation-and-comparison problems well enough to actually get better results than grep for things like "find similar code and see what it does."

(You also don't need that advanced a model to use "grep over a pile of files", but the models today can run MUCH faster than GPT 3.5/4 were running over the APIs back then, making "summarize all five hundred of these matches from those files" much more usable.)

[dd8601fn]

I’ve had very good luck having my system search for available tool functions with natural language (ultimately against Qdrant). I’m surprised to hear that people are trying to grep files, instead.

[ACCount37]

People? No, that's what AI agents themselves do.

There are theoretical gains from using a vector search engine in an agentic loop, but grep is the lowest common denominator of agentic search.