Does a Language Server Save Tokens for Coding Agents? A Measurement Methodology and Preliminary Study

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.13568v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coding agents spend most of their context budget on retrieval. Lexical retrieval (grep) is universal, instant, and zero-setup, but noisy: it cannot tell a definition from a call from a comment. Semantic retrieval via the Language Server Protocol (LSP) is precise and typed, but needs a running, indexed server and pays a per-symbol round-trip. The claim that semantic retrieval is more token-efficient is, we find, asserted almost everywhere and meas