@Alphayellowcat thanks for the question, you are correct, we recently made some changes to how agents search the codebase. Over the last months, models have gotten really good at using grep / indexed search, so the older dedicated semantic search path was rapidly no longer helping in a meaningful way.
Agents now lean on our “Instant Grep” tool (and normal file reads), which is what you are seeing in the tool list. For almost all workflows this should feel the same or better, if something specific got worse for you after this change, reply with a request id and repo shape and we will dig in.
Also since search now runs directly against the files on your machine, Cursor no longer needs to build a semantic index of your codebase which means we’re no longer computing embeddings of your code or storing them on our servers for search.
On some older versions of Cursor, the indexing UI may still show progress, that does not mean a separate semantic search tool is available to the agent.