- Node.js 22+ (LTS recommended)
- Antfly — search backend (installed automatically by
dev setup) - Cursor or Claude Code (for MCP integration)
npm:
npm install -g @prosdevlab/dev-agentpnpm:
pnpm add -g @prosdevlab/dev-agentyarn:
yarn global add @prosdevlab/dev-agentVerify the installation:
dev --versionRun dev setup to start the search backend:
dev setup # Uses native Antfly (default)
dev setup --docker # Or use DockerThis does three things:
- Installs Antfly if not found (offers to install via Homebrew)
- Pulls the embedding model — downloads the ONNX model for local embeddings
- Starts the Antfly server — handles hybrid search and embeddings locally
What is Antfly? Antfly is the search engine that powers dev-agent. It runs locally on your machine — your code never leaves. It provides hybrid search (BM25 keyword matching + vector similarity) which is significantly better than pure vector search for code.
Navigate to your project and index it:
cd /path/to/your/project
dev indexdev mcp install --cursorThis configures Cursor to use dev-agent's MCP server.
Restart Cursor to pick up the new MCP configuration.
In Cursor's AI chat, ask:
"Use dev_search to find authentication code"
If dev-agent is working, you'll see semantic search results from your codebase.
cd /path/to/your/project
dev indexdev mcp installThe MCP tools should now be available in Claude Code.
dev-agent stores its data in ~/.dev-agent/:
~/.dev-agent/
├── indexes/ # Vector databases (per-repo)
├── github/ # GitHub metadata cache
└── config.json # Global configuration (optional)
Note: Each repository gets its own index. Indexes are keyed by the repository's absolute path.
Make sure npm's global bin is in your PATH:
# Check where npm installs global packages
npm config get prefix
# Add to PATH (add to ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc)
export PATH="$(npm config get prefix)/bin:$PATH"-
Check the MCP configuration:
dev mcp list --cursor
-
Verify your repository is indexed:
dev status
-
Restart Cursor completely (not just reload window)
If indexing fails, try:
# Clean and re-index
dev clean
dev index