It's not always amenable to grepping. But this is a great use case for AST searches, and is part of the reason that LSP tools should really be better integrated with agents.

Agents do use LSPs.

Programming language are formal, so unless you’re doing magic stuff (eval and reflection), you can probably grep into a file, eliminate false positive cases, then do a bit of awk or shell scripting with sed. Or use Vim or Emacs tooling.

Ah yes, don't fix the agents, fix the tools.

What a ridiculously backwards approach.

We were supposed to get agents who could use human tooling. Instead we are apparently told to write interfaces for this stumbling expensive mess to use.

Maybe, just maybe, if the human can know to, and use, the AST tool fine, the problem is not the tool but the agent.