Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools

Re:Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools by nomilk on Friday September 04, 2026 @12:07AM (#49560435)

Tangental, but my LSP config breaks every few months. I don't bother to fix it anymore, I open an LLM in ~/dotfiles and complain until it works again, usually in a few minutes.

What's interesting is observing how much work this takes. (it gives me much more empathy toward my past self - how was a clumsy human supposed to know and reason about these things!?, especially when I hadn't touched the configs since a few months prior and had forgotten them almost entirely).

Most often theres 10-20 very small programs all working together to give the desired experience. The amount of minutes and tokens required to solve these seemingly simple problems like "My LSP isn't working" is sometimes much more than expected.

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Re:Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools by weknowbetter on Friday September 04, 2026 @12:36AM (#49560572)

I bet if you look back, you were using a lot less effort in the past than what you see the LLM doing now. They are pretty bad at taking a straight line to the solution.

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Re:Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools by tombert on Friday September 04, 2026 @12:37AM (#49560577)

I have the exact same anecdote; it makes me wonder if this is a common enough use case that a small language model could be trained and run locally for these kinds of “configuration bullshit problems”.

I feel like a very large percentage of my Claude usage ends up having it automate configuration shit, because historically that has been the part of software engineering I have always hated.

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Re:Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools by SSLy on Friday September 04, 2026 @06:42AM (#49562813)

it's not small but DS4F is cheap enough to have a go on this, it works wonderfully

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Re:Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools by 6yyyyyy on Friday September 04, 2026 @12:45AM (#49560623)

This seems like the LLM is vastly overcomplicating things. My entire Neovim config is a single 500 line init.lua and this is enough for LSP to work.

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Re:Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools by jeltz on Friday September 04, 2026 @01:00AM (#49560693)

LLMs love overcomplicating things so that is to be expected.

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Re:Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools by lelandbatey on Friday September 04, 2026 @02:09AM (#49561085)

My nvim LSP config is 20 lines and mostly consists of "if you see X language, use Y program as LSP".

I also have been using the same LSP config for approximately 7 years.

I don't get the pain.

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Re:Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools by chachachainsaw on Friday September 04, 2026 @09:52AM (#49564676)

I mentioned on the main thread, but thought it would be topical here too. Claude Code ships LSP support but only if packaged within a plugin. So there are hoops you have to jump through to get it rather than getting it out of the box. But it might be long term more reliable than ad hoc fixes?

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