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Symbolic tags

grep -r '\bXXX\b' corporate_code_base

Versus semantic tags

grep -r '\b(FIXME|TODO|NOTE)\b' corporate_code_base

And that is before you discover two new semantic tags in a single bug fixing dive.

Premature categorisation is a fundamental error, which will have repercussions down the track.

Clearly, we need to use header files to define our semantic comments as types with inheritance.

Is \b a new thing to grep? I think you'll need egrep anyway for the alternation pipe symbol. And I'm surprised \b works too.

Rather than \b you can just use -w (whole word option).

If those fail, then traditionally grep used \< and \> to mark beginning and end of word respectively.