I'm an engineer on the code intelligence team at Sourcegraph.

We've been busy building out true precise code intelligence/navigation support, but we also have a mode for zero-configuration code navigation based on text search, universal-ctags, and hand-rolled regular expressions (which works surprisingly well!). Tree-sitter would definitely give better results than our current ctags-based approach. It's been catching our attention more and more lately, and we have plans to use it to upgrade our out-of-the-box, instant code navigation experience.

It's not the exact right fit for our primary goals though, since it's designed around being extremely fast while editing and robust against errors. Sourcegraph is only used for navigating committed code, so we're leveraging formats like LSIF to generate complete semantic graphs of codebases and their entire dependency tree. That'll enable a lot of features that are out of reach for tree-sitter, but is a lot harder to get working out of the box and it's a much bigger technical investment.

It's very interesting to see the topological space that houses these solutions fill out. Every tool has its own set of unique trade-offs and fall somewhere on these spectrums:

- fast vs slow

- precise vs imprecise

- zero-configuration vs configuration required

We've visited a few islands in this space but still very curious to see what other islands can be discovered. We're especially excited about tools and formats like tree-sitter and LSIF around which a large and supportive community can grow so that all the products we love and rely on as developers can all make forward progress.