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Fast regex search: indexing text for agent tools · Cursor

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How we're building indexes for regular expression search so agents can find text in large monorepos without the 15-second ripgrep waits.

Blog / research Time is a flat circle. When the first version of grep was released in 1973, it was a basic utility for matching regular expressions over text files in a filesystem. Over the years, as developer tools became more advanced, it was gradually superseded by more specialized tools. First, by roughly syntactic indexes such as ctags . Later on, many developers moved to specialized IDEs for specific programming languages that allowed them to navigate codebases very efficiently by parsing and building syntactical indexes, often augmented with type-level information. Eventually this was s

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