Fair comment- the initial thinking was to have both and in fact a hybrid mode too which fuses results so you can get chunks that match both semantically and on keyword search in one resultset. Later could add a reranker too.

Or another way of thinking. How much is the penalty we are talking about for semantic vs conventional grep?

My thinking is that for large codebase, sorting embedding matches maybe more efficient than reading all files and hence there is no point to put semantic search behind a --semantic flag