What does this research mean for the field?

File-Augmented Retrieval (FAR) improves file-discovery accuracy to 82.6% for AI coding agents, significantly outperforming traditional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods which achieve only 58.7%. Novelty: ClaimNovelty.NOVEL_FINDING. Consensus alignment: ConsensusAlignment.NEUTRAL.

What question did this study set out to answer?

The research aims to improve AI coding agents' ability to read binary files by implementing a new file-augmentation approach.

February 19, 20260 citationsOpen Access

File-Augmented Retrieval: Making Every File Readable to Coding Agents via Persistent .meta Sidecars

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KCKelly Peilin Chan

Key Points

The research aims to improve AI coding agents' ability to read binary files by implementing a new file-augmentation approach.
Introduced File-Augmented Retrieval (FAR) with persistent .meta sidecars for binary files.
Compared FAR's performance with traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
Assessed the effectiveness using a 10,000-file heterogeneous corpus.
FAR achieved 82.6% file-discovery accuracy, significantly higher than RAG’s 58.7%.
FAR does not require additional runtime infrastructure, simplifying usage.
Only 6.3% storage overhead is needed for .meta files.

Abstract

AI coding agents—Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot—cannot read binary files.In a typical enterprise repository, 30–40% of files are non-text, yet they contain critical context. We propose File-Augmented Retrieval (FAR): a file-time augmentation paradigm that adds a persistent .meta sidecar to every file, containing extracted content as Markdown with minimal YAML provenance. Unlike RAG, FAR requires no runtime infrastructure—agents simply read .meta files directly from the filesystem. On a 10,000-file heterogeneous corpus, FAR achieves 82.6% file-discovery accuracy compared to 58.7% for RAG, with zero infrastructure and 6.3% storage overhead. RAG performs retrieval at query time. FAR performs augmentation at file time.

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File-Augmented Retrieval: Making Every File Readable to Coding Agents via Persistent .meta Sidecars

Key Points

Abstract

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