For sure, Claude Code specifically has a grep and glob tool (as well as access to bash). The LLM will decide to use those tools to find files, then once it has found matches to what it's looking for, it reads those files into its context. It will then decide if it indeed was a successful match and start working on that file. There's a lot of times it finds a match using grep, reads that into its context and then decides "no, that's not what I was actually looking for..." and moves on.
Unlike some other AI coding IDEs, Claude Code doesn't either keep your entire codebase in context, or use some sort of vector representation and vector search of your code. It basically uses grep to find a keyword it's looking for then reads the file (it can also just read a few lines of a file too) into its context.
It seems to be the "magic" of Claude Code..it's very UNIX like, uses existing tools to do what it needs to do instead of trying to re-invent the wheel, so to speak.
Unlike some other AI coding IDEs, Claude Code doesn't either keep your entire codebase in context, or use some sort of vector representation and vector search of your code. It basically uses grep to find a keyword it's looking for then reads the file (it can also just read a few lines of a file too) into its context.
It seems to be the "magic" of Claude Code..it's very UNIX like, uses existing tools to do what it needs to do instead of trying to re-invent the wheel, so to speak.