After shipping the first version of sgrep with ColBERT late interaction, I thought the hard work was done. The search accuracy was good - MRR of 0.70 on my test queries, significantly better than plain semantic search. But when I started using it on larger codebases, problems emerged.

Recently, there was a great mrep tool published by mxbread team, helping to address the issue that LLM harnesses such as claude code, codex, amp, when doing search, spent unnecessary time to retrieve useless tokens. Here’s what mgrep claim: