| name | code-search |
| description | Find where something lives in an unfamiliar Workspace. Use when asked where a function, symbol, config value, or piece of behaviour is defined, or when you need to understand a codebase's layout before changing it. |
Finding things in a Workspace
Search before you read. Reading whole files to locate one symbol wastes context you will need later for the actual work.
Order of operations
list_dir /workspace first. Layout tells you where to look and stops you searching the whole tree.glob when you know roughly what the file is called — *.config.*, *test*, *.md.grep when you know what the code says rather than where it lives.read_file last, and with offset/limit once grep has told you the line number.
Patterns that pay off
Find a definition rather than every mention:
grep -rn "function handlePayment" /workspace
grep -rn "class .*Repository" /workspace
grep -rn "export (const|function|class) name" /workspace
Find callers, then narrow:
grep -rn "handlePayment(" /workspace
Find configuration and constants:
grep -rni "timeout|retry|max_|limit" /workspace
Get the shape of a file cheaply before reading it:
grep -n "^(export |function |class |def |const )" /workspace/src/thing.ts
When a search returns too much
Do not read all of it. Narrow instead: add a directory, add context to the pattern, or count first with grep -rc pattern /workspace to see whether the search was even the right one.
Reporting
Answer with file paths and line numbers, not prose summaries of code the Operator can read. src/billing.ts:412 is more useful than three sentences describing what happens there.
