// Is Grep All You Need? //
Pay attention to this on, AI devs.
(bookmark it)
They find that grep-style text search, when wrapped in the right agent harness, matches or beats embedding-based retrieval on coding-agent tasks.
Are vector databases even needed where this is all going?
It might be that what coding agents needed was not better embeddings. It was better harness design around primitive tools.
If you operate a coding-agent stack that depends on a vector DB, it might be time to re-evaluate.
My personal experience on this has been that agentic search, if done right, is more than good enough for a lot of use cases. But you also have to understand how to properly index and structure information for the agents to take advantage. At scale, vector databases do shine so take that into account as well. In most cases, a hybrid approach often works best but that's something we haven't figured out really well as of yet.
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15184
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