Explore

Overview

Explore is a discovery-specialist agent that quickly finds files, code patterns, and relationships between symbols in a codebase. Its default model is haiku, making it fast and cheap, and it specializes in finding "where things are."

Explore is a read-only agent. It does not create or modify files, and returns search results as message text.

It handles internal codebase exploration only. Lookups of external documentation, academic papers, and API references are handled by document-specialist.

When to Use

• When you need to find which file implements a specific feature
• When tracking down where a code pattern or symbol is used
• When understanding project structure and relationships between files
• When other agents (planner, executor, etc.) need to gather codebase context before starting work

Usage Examples

"Find where the auth-related code is"
"Find all files that call this function"
"Map out the routing structure of the project"

Explore runs parallel searches from multiple angles rather than a single search. For example, when finding "auth-related code," it simultaneously searches controllers, middleware, token validation, session management, and more.

Tools Used

• Glob: Find files by name/pattern
• Grep: Search code content by text pattern
• ast_grep_search: Search structural patterns such as function shapes and class structures
• lsp_document_symbols: View a file's symbol overview (functions, classes, variables)
• lsp_workspace_symbols: Search symbol names across the entire workspace
• Bash: Query history/change records with git commands

Context Conservation Strategy

Explore conserves context window space.

• For files over 200 lines, it first checks the overview with lsp_document_symbols
• For files over 500 lines, it prioritizes structural tools over reading the whole file
• For large files, it reads only the needed section using offset/limit parameters
• Parallel reads are limited to 5 files at a time

Combining with Other Agents

• planner: Explore is run first to gather codebase context before plan creation
• executor: Spawns explore agents to understand existing patterns and dependencies before implementation
• architect: Used for initial file mapping during architecture analysis
• debugger: Used to quickly locate code related to a bug

Reference