Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

Here's a common question we get from prospective Cline users: "How does Cline handle large codebases? Do you use RAG to index everything?" It's a reasonable question. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the go-to solution for giving AI systems access to large knowledge bases. But for Cline, we've taken a deliberately different path. We don't index your codebase, and this choice isn't an oversight's a fundamental design decision that delivers better code quality, stronger security, and more reliable results. Here's why. Why RAG Breaks Down for Code RAG emerged as a clever solution to a real problem: early language models had limited context windows, so we needed ways to feed them relevant information from larger datasets. The approach seems straightforward – chunk your data, create embeddings, store them in a vector database, and retrieve relevant pieces when needed. But code isn't like other data. It's interconnected, constantly evolving, and often contains your most s ... Read full article.