AI Systems Atlas

G-10Repo Indexing & Code Search

/coding-agents/repo-indexing

Symbol maps and semantic search turn ten rounds of grep into one hop.

Step-by-step walkthrough4 steps

Navigation is most of a coding agent’s token bill.
Without an index: grep, read, grep again — 16 tool calls of guessing.
With one: the question maps to the file in a single hop.
Same destination — a fraction of the context spent getting there.

Key insight

Navigation is most of a coding agent’s token bill; an index converts that recurring cost into a one-time build.

Failure mode

A stale index: confidently wrong answers about code that moved is worse than grep’s slow honesty.

Further reading

SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering Yang et al., NeurIPS 2024
Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks Lewis et al., NeurIPS 2020

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