Why Claude Code and Cursor Abandoned Vector Databases for Agentic Retrieval
Anthropic removed vector search from Claude Code in 2025, replacing it with grep and finding it outperformed RAG by a wide margin; Cursor, Windsurf, and others followed. Benchmarks show agentic keyword retrieval achieves 94.5% of RAG's faithfulness with zero vector databases, while multi-agent systems beat single models by 90.2%. The shift moves retrieval from pre-computed indexes to just-in-time tool use, though vector search remains for semantic queries and massive stable corpora.
