AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 — unofficial import demo

Coding agents can grep the filesystem, but sometimes semantic search is more useful for finding the right files, especially on large codebases. Claude Code and Codex, unlike Cursor, do not use semantic search for code retrieval. There are good reasons for this, but Cursor has consistently demonstrated that semantic retrieval can materially improve code search to improve answer accuracy, increase code retention, and reduce token usage. In this session, we'll share a coding agent plugin for semantic codebase search alongside other modalities (BM25, regex/globbing/grep, filtering), and demonstrate how an agent can choose the right tool for the job. We'll share benchmark-style results that compare answer quality and token consumption with and without semantic retrieval across a small set of representative tasks.