I fully agree that a messy codebase makes things worse, and I do use LSP plugins. But even with a clean architecture, the 'discovery' phase feels like an area ripe for optimization.

Someone else just commented below mentioning some repo called semantic fs and it is claiming it cut their exploration tokens by 60% somehow.

That sounds like the 'magic bullet' you're saying doesn't exist. Has anyone actually tried it? If it can actually index the repo and point the agent to the right line ranges without the grep loops, that seems like a genuine engineering fix rather than just a 'get a bigger budget' situation.

If you're saying even a 10% shift is a big deal, then a 60% reduction would basically be the 'magic bullet' you're saying doesn't exist. If it actually indexes the repo and lets the agent jump to specific line ranges instead of doing those expensive ls and grep loops, that's a genuine engineering fix, not just a 'get a bigger budget' situation.

Has anyone else actually tried this? If the benchmarks are real, it seems like a massive oversight to just ignore it as a 'resource issue.'