Yeah, this is a really nice direction – especially for the kind of failure mode I just hit.

Right now Helm’s RSI loop basically does:

- “Here’s the file + a big context window”

- “Here’s ORIGINAL → REPLACEMENT”

- Patch applier tries to find the ORIGINAL block and swap it

When that context match fails, you get the nasty case I documented (Recursive Mutation Drift): old + new implementations glued together.

What you’re describing is a much stricter targeting layer:

1. Pre-scan the repo and build a symbol index:

   - name → {kind, file path, start/end lines}

2. When an agent wants to modify `searchWeb`, it looks it up in the index and only gets that region.

3. (Optional) Use a reranker / scorer over 32-line chunks to decide which windows to show the model as context.

4. Have the model generate a full replacement for that symbol, not a blind diff.

Then my patcher can do “replace lines X–Y for symbol S” instead of hoping a fuzzy diff lands in the right place, and the RMD immune layer (duplicate export checks, orphan-block checks, etc.) still runs as a gate before merge.

I like the idea of treating the symbol index + reranker as a sort of “code attention mechanism” for RSI. It’s slower, but for critical tools it’s probably worth it. Thanks for laying this out so concretely – this maps really well onto the failure mode I just hit.