this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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Claude is very good at figuring out how to work around limitations (which is probably one reason why it's also good at finding security issues).
At work, the monorepo is enormous and files are loaded on-demand as needed. This isn't uncommon with huge repos - Microsoft have VFS for Git (although I hear that's deprecated now), Meta have EdenFS, and Google has some proprietary solution.
We have a hook that blocks
findandgrepbecause they can be extremely slow, and tells it to instead use some significantly faster MCP tools to search the codebase, powered by a search index with local changes overlaid.GPT-5.5 has no problem with this. Claude Opus mostly does it, but sometimes it loves to find workarounds rather than following the instructions. Things like: Try alternative commands like egrep. Create a symlink to grep and run that to see if it bypasses the filtering. Run it with a different shell like
zsh. Write a Python script that execs grep. Write a Python script to reimplement grep.I'm trying Hermes Agent at home, but I have it in its own VM with restricted permissions.
Can you please share with us the search MCP and tools you have. Seems a smart alternative than dumb grep and find. Wastes so Mich tokens.
Unfortunately the search tooling is specific to our internal systems. It's essentially just a cronjob that periodically indexes the entire repo and a backend service to do the search.
Smart enough, maybe we can achieve the same using meilisearch or similar.