Search Strategies for Agentic Flows

How AI agents (Claude, GPT, Gemini, custom LLM agents) can leverage tea-rags reranking presets and custom weights to get task-appropriate code search results instead of generic similarity matches.

The Problem

Default semantic search returns results ranked by vector similarity only. But an agent investigating a production bug needs different results than an agent onboarding a new developer, even for the same query. Reranking solves this by re-scoring results using git metadata signals (churn, age, ownership, etc.) combined with task-specific weight profiles.

Available Tools and Their Presets

search_code (practical development)

Preset	Signals	Best for
relevance	similarity only	General code lookup (default)
recent	similarity 0.7 + recency 0.3	Sprint review, incident response
stable	similarity 0.7 + stability 0.3	Finding reliable implementations

semantic_search / hybrid_search (analytics)

Preset	Key signals	Best for
relevance	similarity only	General lookup (default)
techDebt	age + churn + bugFix + volatility	Legacy code assessment
hotspots	chunkChurn + chunkRelativeChurn + burstActivity + bugFix + volatility	Bug-prone areas, risk assessment
codeReview	recency + burstActivity + density + chunkChurn	Recent changes review
onboarding	documentation + stability	New developer entry points
securityAudit	age + ownership + bugFix + pathRisk + volatility	Old critical code, security review
refactoring	chunkChurn + relativeChurnNorm + chunkSize + volatility + bugFix + age	Refactor candidates
ownership	ownership + knowledgeSilo	Knowledge silos, bus factor
impactAnalysis	similarity + imports	Dependency chains, blast radius

Custom Weights

Any signal can be combined with arbitrary weights:

{
  "rerank": {
    "custom": {
      "similarity": 0.4,
      "burstActivity": 0.3,
      "bugFix": 0.2,
      "pathRisk": 0.1
    }
  }
}

Available weight keys: similarity, recency, stability, churn, age, ownership, chunkSize, documentation, imports, bugFix, volatility, density, chunkChurn, relativeChurnNorm, burstActivity, pathRisk, knowledgeSilo, chunkRelativeChurn.