Show HN: Is grep enough? A transparent benchmark for agentic code navigation

https://entelligentsia.github.io/is-grep-enough/

by bonigv • 23 days ago

4 2 23 days ago

entelligentsia.github.io

Felt LSP Servers were too complex. Bash tools alone too brutish. Wanted to see what if it is a tree-sitter as a firstclass tool. Ran a bench over 10 large codebases [bitcoin, django, rails, redis,...] at 5 levels of exploration complexity each. That 150 context isolated runs over the last few days. Sharing the results with full tarnsparency. All scripts, docker image scripts, all transcrpts. There is a TL;DR; but I hope you don't leave it at that. Has been quite a bit of work. Repo links are on the site.

6thbit• 23 days ago

This is nicely put together, it does make sense that lsps help more as complexity grows because makes navigation across symbols easier.

I hope someone with a large budget can reproduce these with latest Opus/gpt.

My gut feeling is that higher reasoning models tend to use grep more effectively. But intuitively lsp should still win there.

bonigv• 22 days ago

You are absolutely right about what we feel intuitively - LSPs should beat the shit out of the competition. But surprisingly it did not. Across 10 different LSP servers, across 5 different levels of prompt complexity it did not. Mind you, I painstakingly warmed up the LSP servers that needed it warmed. Some liked it cold and it fared equally non impressively. The pattern I saw was, LLMs (sonnet w.6 with cc) was very clever to use whatever it had to get to a verifiable answer. It could do it just with bash for sure. But as the prompt complexity grew the cost also rose.

Treesitter is sitting in a sweet spot here. a vrainy LLM can find the shortest path with high quality with treesitter and a few bash calls.