A post[1] from the Manus ex lead engineer on r/LocalLLama got me thinking about improving the tooling these agents have.

Saw CC will use rip-grep if installed, but it won't install it by default for you.

Was wondering if using tree-sitter could reduce token usage, increase speed and better output. Or does this reduce the quality b/c CC now doesn't have the entire glob in memory?

Want to ask the smart people here, what in your workflow that has had a meaningful impact. Currently using CC and codex

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1rrisqn/i_was_backend_lead_at_manus_after_building_agents/

  • d675 6 hours ago |
    He discusses:

    Instead of maintaining a catalog of tools like read_file, grep, list_dir, they just expose one run(command: str) tool and let the LLM compose Unix pipelines. It has access to one tool for shell commands: run(...)

    I think you could use mcp-shell , written in Go instead of python subprocesses