Index Repositories for Instant Grep is broken

Support Bug Reports
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

In both single projects, and multi-root workspace projects in Cursor, having the “Index Repositories for instant Grep” option enabled just makes cursor unable to find anything. It can’t find a single word in the codebase, everything just returns “no results”. If it switches to using ripgrep via the shell, then it works. Probably something wrong with the search tool.

Steps to Reproduce

As far as I can tell, just open a project and ask the AI Chat to find something in a file.

Expected Behavior

Should be able to do basic searches

Operating System

MacOS

Version Information

Version: 3.6.31
VS Code Extension API: 1.105.1
Commit: 81fcf2931d7687b4ff3f3017858d0c6dee7e2a60
Date: 2026-05-31T17:46:29.630Z
Layout: editor
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 39.8.1
Chromium: 142.0.7444.265
Node.js: 22.22.1
V8: 14.2.231.22-electron.0
xterm.js: 6.1.0-beta.220
OS: Darwin arm64 25.4.0

For AI issues: which model did you use?

Opus 4.6 1M High

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

6

Hi potrebic!

This is a known bug with the indexed grep feature. When “Index Repositories for Instant Grep” is enabled, the agent routes all searches through an indexed backend that can return empty results without falling back to direct search.

Immediate fix: Open Cursor Settings, search for “Index Repositories for Instant Grep”, and disable it. Then reload the window (Cmd+Shift+P > Developer: Reload Window). This forces the agent to use direct ripgrep, which should restore Grep/Glob immediately.

One common cause for the index returning empty in standard repos: a .git directory in a parent of your workspace (e.g., ~/.git from dotfiles versioning). Could you check?

ls -d ~/.git 2>/dev/null

You may also find this related thread helpful — same symptoms.