ripgrep vs grep: Performance Benchmarks and Why AI Agents Use rg

I have spent the last few years watching the developer tools ecosystem converge on a single search tool. VS Code uses it. Cursor uses it. Claude Code uses it. Codex CLI uses it. Aider uses it. Nearly every AI coding agent that needs to search a codebase reaches for the same binary: ripgrep. That is not an accident. When milliseconds matter - and they absolutely matter when an LLM is waiting for context - the difference between grep and ripgrep is the difference between a responsive agent and on...