LightOn reports lower search-token use with ColGrep-Agent
The company’s coding-search test found a token saving alongside lower observed accuracy and longer run time.
Event / data period: 2026-10-12
Published: · Updated:
LightOn researchers introduced ColGrep-Agent-2B on October 12, a local model that searches code repositories and returns file locations and excerpts to a larger coding agent. In the team’s test, Claude Code with Sonnet 5.5 handled 52 code-search questions across 13 repositories, with each question run three times in four setups. The delegated setup used 93,000 API tokens per question on average, compared with 142,000 for grep.
LightOn reports 34.3% fewer API tokens and 40% lower cache-aware API cost, but observed correct answers were 80.8% versus 83.3% for grep, and average time was 21.6 seconds versus 13 seconds. The accuracy difference was not statistically significant, but the reported interval does not rule out a meaningful drop. The results cover code-search tasks, not complete coding work, and are the authors’ own measurements.
Data
Announcement summary
The company’s coding-search test found a token saving alongside lower observed accuracy and longer run time.
- · Occurred
LightOn reports lower search-token use with ColGrep-Agent
The company’s coding-search test found a token saving alongside lower observed accuracy and longer run time.
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