colgrep-search

Use before shell grep/rg whenever a question is about meaning, not literal text — locating where or how something is implemented, mapping an unfamiliar codebase, finding every call site before a refactor or rename, or checking whether a repo already does X before building it again. colgrep-mcp's tools (search, find_files, expand, index_status/index_build/index_clear/index_prune, list_indexes, doctor) run hybrid semantic + keyword search over code units (functions, classes, methods, docs sections), not raw lines, so natural-language queries surface relevant code even when it shares no vocabulary with the query. Anti-pattern: reaching for shell grep/rg, or the Grep tool, to answer a "where/how does X work" question — literal-text search misses renamed, refactored, or differently-worded implementations. Plain grep is still fine for a single already-known literal string inside one file you already have open.