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Do not build this at scale. Search across thousands of repositories is the product, and it is an indexing problem rather than a grep.

Fast, structural, cross-repository search with references and definitions resolved means language analysis plus an index that stays current across a very large amount of code. At that size it is genuinely hard.

FIRST, CHECK YOUR SIZE
- A handful of repositories? `ripgrep` locally is faster than any hosted search, and it costs nothing
- Your forge's own code search covers most cross-repository questions for free
- Zoekt — the open indexer this category is built on — is available and runs happily over a few hundred repositories on one machine

WHEN TO KEEP PAYING
- Thousands of repositories, or a large organisation where finding every caller of a function is a daily question
- Automated refactors across many repositories at once, which is the feature that genuinely saves weeks

WHAT TO BUILD IF YOU WANT SOMETHING
- Zoekt in a container, indexing your organisation's repositories on a schedule, with a small search page in front. That is an afternoon and it covers regular-expression and symbol search across everything
- Add per-repository permissions if the code is not all open internally, checked in the query rather than filtered afterwards
- A saved-search alert: notify me when a pattern appears anywhere. That is how you catch a deprecated call being reintroduced, and it is a cron job

THE THING WORTH MORE THAN THE SEARCH
- **A codemod runner.** A script that clones every repository, applies a transformation, runs the tests, and opens a pull request per repository. That is the actual value of large-scale code intelligence, and it is a few hundred lines with an abstract syntax tree library
- Rate-limited, resumable, and with a dry run that shows the diff before anything is opened. Forty pull requests opened by accident is a bad afternoon for everybody

THE ONE-LINE VERSION
Count your repositories first. Under a few hundred, Zoekt and ripgrep cover it — and build the codemod runner, which is where the real saving is.