Comment by andai

>The best way to search I think is a coding agent with grep and file system access, and that is because the agent can adapt and explore instead of one shotting it.

I tried the knowledge base feature in Claude web recently, uploaded a long textbook.

The indexer crashed and the book never fully indexed, but Claude had access to some kind of VM and reverse engineered the (automatically converted) book's fileformat and used shell tools to search it for the answers to my questions.

(Again, this was the web version of Claude, not Claude Code on my computer!)

I thought that was really neat, a little silly, and a little scary.