# Agentic search vs. semantic index

Band: contested — Practitioners actively disagree. Anyone claiming it is settled is selling something.
Group: The harness

The live architectural disagreement in code retrieval. Claude Code does not index or embed; it greps on demand, citing precision, freshness, simplicity and privacy. Cursor indexes with tree-sitter chunking, embeddings and Merkle-tree sync, and now publishes hybrid results. Genuinely unsettled — treat anyone claiming otherwise as selling something. The framing that survives scrutiny: exact search wins when you know the string, structural navigation wins for relationships, large-context stuffing wins when the repo fits, and pure vector retrieval rarely wins on code alone.

## See also

- [Code knowledge graph](https://clickai.dev/legend/code-knowledge-graph)
- [Context rot](https://clickai.dev/legend/context-rot)

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