Tool API Redesign: Naming & Query-Shape Detection

Two improvements to the core tool API: consistent parameter naming across all symbol and search tools, and automatic detection of regex intent in symbols to prevent confusing errors.

API Naming Changes

Parameter names have been standardized across symbol and search tools. Old names are removed — update any saved prompts or scripts.

Parameter renames

Tool	Old param	New param
`symbols`	`name_path`	`symbol`
`symbols`	`pattern`	`query`
`references`	`name_path`	`symbol`
`symbol_at`	`name_path`	`symbol`
`replace_symbol`	`name_path`	`symbol`
`remove_symbol`	`name_path`	`symbol`
`rename_symbol`	`name_path`	`symbol`
`semantic_search`	`project`	`project_id`
`memory`	`project`	`project_id`

Tool renames

Old name	New name
`search_pattern`	`grep`
`find_file`	`glob`

The renamed tools (grep, glob) are shorter and match the mental model agents already have for these operations.

Query-Shape Detection in symbols

symbols now detects when a query looks like a regex pattern and returns a corrective hint instead of silently returning wrong results.

Agents occasionally pass regex patterns to symbols expecting it to match multiple symbols — but symbols does substring matching on symbol names, not regex. A query like handle_.*_event matches nothing (or coincidentally matches a symbol with .* in its name), giving a misleading empty result.

Behavior

If the query contains regex metacharacters (.*, .+, ^, $, \w, \d, |, (...)) it is flagged as regex-like and a RecoverableError is returned:

{
  "error": "query looks like a regex pattern — use grep(pattern=...) for regex search",
  "hint": "symbols matches by substring; grep searches file content by pattern"
}

When it fires

Query	Detected as	Action
`handle_event`	plain substring	normal symbol search
`handle_.*_event`	regex-like	RecoverableError → redirect to grep
`^MyStruct$`	regex-like	RecoverableError → redirect to grep
`foo\|bar`	regex-like	RecoverableError → redirect to grep

Correct tool for each intent

// Find a symbol by name substring
symbols(query="handle_event")

// Find code matching a pattern across files
grep(pattern="handle_.*_event")

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