Get the latest tech news
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, a
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. Chunking is relatively simple for natural language text — paragraphs (and sentences) provide obvious boundary points for creating semantically meaningful segments. The result: your assistant confidently suggests calling functions that no longer exist or missing critical abstractions your team introduced last week.
Or read this on Hacker News
