Pattern Overload (And Why We Love It)
hprscript: Multi-Pattern Search Without Running grep N Times Why I built it Like many other programmers, I use AI agents for code development. A lot of the work is supervising what the agent does - reading its plans, checking its diffs, and sanity-checking the code it touches. That means a lot of grep commands, run one after another, often against the same tree. At some point I started thinking this was wasteful. Each grep invocation re-reads the files, re-compiles its pattern, and pays its own startup cost. And when an AI agent is the one driving, every separate search also re-sends the surrounding context to the model - the same conversation, the same instructions, the same tool schemas - just to ask one more question of the same codebase. Ten searches mean ten round trips, ten context replays, ten walks over the data. I knew there was a library that could match many patterns at once: Intel's Hyperscan . It compiles N regexes into a single DFA and matches them all ...