Why Cline Doesn't Index Your Codebase

May 29, 2025

Why Cline Doesn’t Index Your Codebase (And Why That’s a Good Thing). An interesting blog post by Cline on why they don’t use a RAG-based approach, which is common is similar products such as Cursor, to handle large codebases. In essence, their rational boils down to:

• they don’t think a RAG-based approach offers better codebase search results
• it’s a pain to keep the index up-to-date
• security

They say though that it may make sense for a product charging $20/month.

#cline #ai-tools #rag #codebase