The sentence nobody could find
Early on, we watched an agent try to find one sentence in a team drive. It knew the sentence existed. A teammate had written it the week before, in a call note about single sign-on. The agent listed folders, opened every file that looked promising, and gave up after about forty reads.
On a laptop the fix is easy. You run grep and the disk answers in a moment. A shared drive in the cloud has no disk next to the agent, so every file it opens is a trip over the network. Grep over a network turns into a long afternoon.
Search built into your drive
FlashDrive brings search to the files your team and agents share. Find words and phrases, look for a pattern with grep, or narrow the search to a folder.
Your agent can find a matching file, read the relevant lines and keep working. It does not need to download the entire drive to search it.
The search tools work alongside the same file access your agents use to read and write. You choose the scope, and the agent works within its permissions.
Agents search like they write code
Most search boxes expect a person typing a few words. Agents spend their days writing code, so they search with the tools of code: grep for an exact string, a regular expression for a pattern, a path to narrow things to one folder, and then a read of the lines around the match.
So that is the interface we gave them. An agent can grep the whole drive, match a pattern, filter by path and read a file by line numbers, the same moves it makes in a repository on a laptop. When it wants a phrase ranked by relevance, full-text search sits right next to them.
These tools work together. A keyword query finds the right call notes, a regular expression picks out dates, and a read confirms the surrounding lines. Agents can use the same sequence they use when navigating code.
It should feel like nothing
The best thing people say about our search is that they never think about it. They ask their agent who owns the pricing page, and a moment later it answers with the file and the line.
Under that answer, the agent ran a handful of searches across the whole drive and read a few lines. To the person asking, it just knew. That feeling is what we were after, and it is why we built the engine before almost anything else.
If you want to try it, put your team's notes in a drive and ask your agent something you would normally scroll for.