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Sep 6, 2026 · Artificial Intelligence

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.