Why I Replaced Grep with ast-grep in my quest for Code-Aware AI

I asked an AI assistant to refactor a function and watched it grep through my repo, collect guesses, and produce a generic answer. That moment sparked months of experimentation.

Grep was noisy, tree-sitter bindings were complex, and language servers were heavyweight. ast-grep hit the balance: structural insight packed into one binary.

I built XRAY MCP on top of it—a stateless tool exposing map, find, and impact so an assistant (or you) can navigate code the way developers do.

The project is open source; feedback welcome.

https://github.com/srijanshukla18/xray