Deep Agentic Search for Repository-Level Code Question Answering: An Empirical Study
Code agents spend much of their effort simply locating the right code inside a repository. Two approaches dominate current practice. In Semantic Search, the agent retrieves code blocks from a vector index built from the repository in advance. In Deep Agentic Search (also known as grep-search by subagent), a planning agent delegates the exploration to a separate subagent that works in an isolated context window and returns only a condensed result. The second design, which is considered good context engineering practice, exists to protect the main agent from context pollution (also known as context rot), the loss of accuracy that occurs as unrelated material accumulates in the context windo...
| Authors | Amirkia Rafiei Oskooei, Bora Ilci, Alperen Kayim et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 2 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 August 2026 |
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