but a good combination of prompt, harness and model will easily close that gap. a more advanced (but equivalent) form of grep could also offer fuzzy matching/levenshtein distance function to augment that.

It will, but it does so by burning tokens. I'm sure you've also seen the output of an overly eager grep by an LLM.

I think we're verging on the point where people will care more about the most token-efficient ways to do a task than the lowest human effort version. Humans are expensive, humans using half as many tokens are cheaper.

This sounds like AOT vs JIT weights.