alt Hacker NewsIf someone asked you about the usages of a particular element in a codebase, you would probably give a more accurate answer if you were able to use a code search tool rather than reading every source file from top to bottom.
For that kind of tasks (and there are many of those!), I don't see why you would expect something fundamentally different in the case of LLMs.
But why not provide the search tool instead of being an imperfect interface between it and the person asking? The only reason for the latter is that you have more applied knowledge in the context and can use the tool better. For any other case, the answer should be “use this tool”.