Cursor charges $20/mo. Copilot uploads your code. I built a free, local alternative.

I Reverse-Engineered Cursor's Codebase Search and Built an Open-Source Alternative TL;DR: I built CodeContext, an open-source Python MCP server that replicates the hybrid search architecture Cursor IDE uses internally — combining FAISS vector search, BM25 keyword search, Merkle tree sync, and AST-aware chunking. It works with VS Code Copilot, Claude Desktop, or any MCP client. No paid subscription required. Let's Be Honest About What You're Paying For First, let me be clear: Cursor's $20/month isn't just for codebase search. You're paying for an entire IDE experience — AI chat, tab completion, agent mode, cloud agents, frontier model access, and the search indexing that powers all of it. The search is one piece of a much larger product. Similarly, GitHub Copilot's value isn't just indexing — it's code completion, agent mode, PR reviews, and deep GitHub integration. So why did I build just the search piece? Because search quality is the foundation that determines how good everything els