Comment by simonw
11 hours ago
Claude Code doesn't do anything with semantic search or embeddings out of the box. They use a simple grep tool instead.
Neither does OpenAI's Codex CLI - you can confirm that by looking at the source code https://github.com/openai/codex
Cursor and Windsurf both use semantic search via embeddings.
You can get semantic search in Claude Code using this unofficial plugin: https://github.com/zilliztech/claude-context - it's built by and uses a managed vector database called Zilliz Cloud.
That's shocking to me. Although it does make sense from a UX perspective as indexing can take minutes depending on the setup.
It’s surprisingly fast to generate embeddings. I don’t think it’s a UX issue as much as it’s that Anthropic themselves don’t offer any embeddings API (they only have one internally, but publicly recommend Cohere).
They do use RAGs a lot for their desktop app, their projects implementation make a lot of use of it.