Sourcegraph

What hackers pick instead

• ripgrepA much faster grep replacement for searching codebases, also widely used by AI coding agents; the main caveat is its default skipping of gitignored and hidden files.122recommend
• ast-grepA syntax-aware command-line tool for searching and refactoring code without regex headaches, which people also expose to AI agents as a skill. Some report mixed results.21recommend
• SembleDevelopers recommend Semble for fast local code search that needs fewer tokens and queries than grep. Critics question how the token savings are measured.20recommend
• Graft (Claude Code hooks)People recommend it for giving coding agents a map of the code that searches inside files rather than by names, cutting tokens and latency. Critics say the benchmarks are thin and the README reads as generated.13recommend
• Lat.mdRecommended as a Markdown knowledge graph that helps AI agents search code faster than grep. Main caveat: critics want proof of better performance.11recommend

Every quote

The 9 most detailed of 10 comments. Each links to the original.

1. we have gotten much better results and less token usage after we hooked up our codebase

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “RTK reports token savings, but our cost benchmarks disagree”

2. the closest external thing I've found to Google's internal web tool for viewing code

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “A History of IDEs at Google”

3. Sourcegraph produces the most accepted code

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Cursor: Past, Present, and Future”

4. Of course, Sourcegraph is better.

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Cursor: Past, Present, and Future”

5. SourceGraph has a larger index

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “The Kimi K3 Moment”

6. Source graph has done an open-source bait-and-switch before

   Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “Fast trigram based code search”

7. That sounds like SourceGraph but twice as expensive

   Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “RTK reports token savings, but our cost benchmarks disagree”

8. Sourcegraph can't search private repositories

   Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “Fast trigram based code search”

9. 270 foreign keys with no index

   Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “Show HN: Postgres schema review and 3D explorer, run on seven open-source apps”