Cursor finds similar code. A graph knows connected code.

First, what Cursor already does well

Cursor's built-in codebase indexing is genuinely good, and it costs you nothing to use: it's automatic, it's woven into the editor, and it reliably surfaces code that looks relevant to what you're doing. Under the hood it's a semantic index— per Cursor's documentation, your code is chunked and embedded so the agent can retrieve the most similar pieces at question time. For "find the code that handles refunds" or "show me something like this pattern," similarity is exactly the right tool, and Cursor wields it well. If that were the whole job, this page wouldn't exist.

The questions similarity can't answer

The questions that burn time in a real codebase are rarely about resemblance. They're about connection: what breaks if I change this signature? What's the full path from this route to the database? Which of these three similar functions is the one actually called in production? An embedding index has no edges — it can hand the model five lookalike snippets, but the model has to guess how they relate. Graphify builds a knowledge graph instead: code is parsed with tree-sitter into entities and typed relationships (tagged EXTRACTED), your own model infers structure from docs and prose (tagged INFERRED), and anything unresolved is marked AMBIGUOUS rather than papered over. When Cursor's agent asks the graph a question over MCP, the answer arrives as a path it can follow — and you can audit — hop by hop. The full argument for traversal over retrieval is in Graphify vs RAG.

Adding it takes one command

Because Graphify is an open-source (MIT) CLI with an MCP server, adding it to Cursor doesn't change your setup: uv tool install graphifyy, map your repo, register the MCP server, and Cursor's agent gains a second, structural source of context while its built-in indexing keeps doing what it does. Everything Graphify builds stays on your machine — no telemetry, no account, nothing shipped anywhere. The same graph also follows you out of the editor: Claude Code, Copilot, and the rest of your assistantsquery it too, so your codebase memory isn't tied to any one tool. Setup details are in the docs.

When built-in indexing alone is the better fit

Fair is fair: if your projects are small enough that the agent can practically hold them in context, if your questions are mostly "find me the relevant code," or if you want strictly zero extra tooling, Cursor alone will serve you well and you should not install anything. Graphify earns its keep as codebases grow past what similarity search can untangle — lots of indirection, long dependency chains, tribal knowledge living in docs — and when you care that an answer can be traced instead of trusted.

Which fits you

Solo Cursor users:try Cursor alone first. The day it confidently edits the wrong one of two similar functions, add the graph — it's one command and free.

Teams standardizing on AI-assisted work:a shared convention of per-machine graphs gives every developer's agent the same connected picture, in Cursor and outside it, without adding any service to operate.

Enterprises: if you need verification, review, and digest on top of the graph, Graphify Enterprise (early access) runs self-hosted in your VPC. For how graphs compare to other memory approaches, browse all comparisons.