The honest limit
Ask “how many of these exist across everything I own?” and ordinary text search (grep-style) still beats Find and Seek’s default path — unless the agent chooses our counting mode.
Nothing yet reliably prompts the agent to pick that mode. That’s a gap at our end, and it’s on the list.
What counting mode is for
When you or your agent explicitly need a count across the indexed collection, use the count surface the Mac app / MCP tools expose (wording may vary by release). Prefer it for “how many …” questions; prefer the default insight cards for “what does … say?” and “where is …?”.
Related honesty
Short cards are the default. Sometimes an answer only appears if you read the whole file. Agents can request the full source — but short is first, and that trade-off is intentional. See the Hippo Campus Protocol for how escalation works.