Comment by jxf
9 hours ago
It's not always amenable to grepping. But this is a great use case for AST searches, and is part of the reason that LSP tools should really be better integrated with agents.
9 hours ago
It's not always amenable to grepping. But this is a great use case for AST searches, and is part of the reason that LSP tools should really be better integrated with agents.
Works fine in algol-like languages (C, C++ for a start) by just changing the function prototype and finding all instances from the compiler errors, using your compiler as the AST explorer ...
Agents do use LSPs.
Programming language are formal, so unless you’re doing magic stuff (eval and reflection), you can probably grep into a file, eliminate false positive cases, then do a bit of awk or shell scripting with sed. Or use Vim or Emacs tooling.
Ah yes, don't fix the agents, fix the tools.
What a ridiculously backwards approach.
We were supposed to get agents who could use human tooling. Instead we are apparently told to write interfaces for this stumbling expensive mess to use.
Maybe, just maybe, if the human can know to, and use, the AST tool fine, the problem is not the tool but the agent.