Huber: Regex handles 90% of code queries; embeddings add marginal improvement
Jeff Huber · Long Live Context Engineering - with Jeff Huber of Chroma · Aug 19, 2025 · at 31:09
Jeff Huber, co-founder and CEO of Chroma, discusses the performance trade-offs of combining regex and vector search for code retrieval.
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“My guess is that, like, for code today, it's something like, 90% of queries or 85% of queries can be satisfactorily run with regex. Regex is obviously, like, the dominant pattern used by Google code search, GitHub code search, but you maybe can get, like, 15% or 10% or five percent improvement By also using embeddings.”
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