grep vs the graph: when Serena's symbols actually beat search
July 15, 2026
// 9 min read
serena lsp benchmark tooling ai-agents
I ran 23 navigation and edit tasks head-to-head — plain grep against Serena's symbol tools, across four languages. Token savings turned out bimodal: where grep is forced to read, the graph cuts 12–35%; where a regex suffices, it is a tie. And the sturdiest prize was somewhere other than tokens entirely.