ColGrep-Agent: Cutting Frontier Coding Agents’ Tokens by a Third

LightOn has released ColGrep-Agent-2B, an open 2-billion-parameter local code-search agent designed to handle repository exploration before a frontier coding model performs higher-level reasoning. Built around ColGrep’s multi-vector semantic retrieval system, the agent searches code, reads files, follows references, and returns relevant file paths, line ranges, and code snippets for integration with tools such as Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode. In tests involving 52 code-search questions across 13 previously unseen repositories, delegating searches to the agent reduced Claude Code API-token use by 34.3% and cache-aware cost by 40% compared with grep, while showing no statistically significant accuracy difference, although searches increased average response time from 13 to 21.6 seconds. A balanced configuration combining direct semantic search and agent delegation saved 21% of tokens while matching grep’s observed accuracy. The model, trained from MiniCPM5-2B through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning on code-localization tasks, also achieved competitive file and line localization results against substantially larger open models and returned a smaller, more precise set of files than conventional search tools on the Semble benchmark.

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