We Measured It: LSP Saves AI Agents 5-34x Tokens vs Grep

We renamed a function across 24 files in a TypeScript codebase. The grep approach ingested 492,954 bytes to accomplish it: grep to find all occurrences, read each file to understand context, replace, build to verify, read build output. The LSP approach ingested 342 bytes. One rename_symbol call returned a structured workspace edit. That's 1,441x fewer tokens for the exact same operation. The experiment We built a reproducible Go script that measures the actual byte cost of common code intelligen