Hey there, nice editor. How does the Codebase Indexing feature works, for it to not store any of the code on the servers? And are the embeddings made through the API? Thanks!

Hey! The codebase indexing feature works by: Chunking your codebase into small pieces locally Sending each piece to our server which then embeds the code (either with OpenAI’s embedding API or by a custom embedding model) The embeddings are stored in a remote vector DB, along with starting / endi…

So it’s correct to assume that when Local mode is enabled, codebase indexing will still persist the vectors in a remote DB?

Yep. If you prefer, you can turn off indexing in Cursor settings (command + shift + p, “cursor settings”). We also give people an option to turn off indexing in our onboarding flow.

I don’t think they can do much with embedding vectors of our codebases.

[image] truell20: then embeds the code (either with OpenAI’s embedding API or by a custom embedding model) Using OpenAI’s embedding API of Cursor, not the user’s API … right?

[image] RealityMoez: Using OpenAI’s embedding API of Cursor, not the user’s API … right? Yep

If we are using private OpenAI key, with local mode enabled where is the vector database stored when doing codebase indexing? If (with both of those settings enabled) it is still being stored on Cursors servers that should be changed to being stored locally. I would love some more information on th…

It would be useful to be able to exclude file from indexing for security reasons, event if not sent to cursor servers and only sent as embeds.

[image] Mat: If we are using private OpenAI key, with local mode enabled where is the vector database stored when doing codebase indexing? The vector DB will always be remote, though again no code is stored in it (if you turn on local mode, none of your code will be stored at-rest by us). …

[image] Ismael: It would be useful to be able to exclude file from indexing for security reasons, event if not sent to cursor servers and only sent as embeds. Like this idea too. Right now, we have a local heuristic scrubber that blocks any secrets/key from being sent of your computer (both f…

Codebase Indexing

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Alek_Quaylekat (Alek Quaylekat) September 26, 2025, 3:27pm 18

I just deleted the .cursor/codebase.json file and restarted Cursor - indexing kicked off right after that and worked fine. Might be worth a try if you’re stuck.

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Codebase Indexing

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