[pjm331]

the agent greps for the obvious term or terms, reads the resulting documents, discovers new terms to grep for, and the process repeats until its satisfied it has enough info to answer the question

> You could expand grep queries with synonyms, but now you're reimplementing query expansion, which is already part of modern RAG.

in this scenario "you" are not implementing anything - the agent will do this on its own

this is based on my experience using claude code in a codebase that definitely does not have consistent terminology

it doesn't always work but it seemed like you were thinking in terms of trying to get things right in a single grep when it's actually a series of greps that are informed by the results of previous ones