Is Grep All You Need? How Agent Harnesses Reshape Agentic Search (arxiv.org) AI

The arXiv paper evaluates how different retrieval strategies and agent harness/tool-calling styles affect agentic search, comparing grep-based versus vector-based retrieval across two experiments using a 116-question LongMemEval sample and testing robustness to added irrelevant surrounding text. It finds that grep generally achieves higher accuracy than vector retrieval, but that results also vary substantially with the specific harness and how tool outputs are presented to the model.