> I usually can't beat an AI agent harness at this task today. If the AI model is 3x faster I have less of chance.

Yes: we have these new tools that are extremely good at helping us search through our codebases. Not just to find where/how functionalities are implemented: IMO bug searching is even way more powerful.

But: why would you want to compete with AI to do that? I cannot compete with grep/ripgrep... And I'm cool with that.

This lets you focus more on the more interesting parts, where AI/LLMs suck fat balls.