Cursor MCP Server: Codebase Context and Setup

Cursor's own codebase indexing is embeddings-based retrieval: it chunks your repo, embeds it, and ranks results by similarity to whatever the agent is asking. That's genuinely good at "find code like this." It's weaker at the question that actually matters before an edit: who calls this function, and what breaks if I change it. Similarity in vector space isn't the same signal as an edge in a call graph, and an agent that only has the former is guessing at the latter.

Symvanta adds that second signal over MCP: a real code graph (nodes are symbols, edges are calls, imports, implements, instantiates) that Cursor's agent can query directly, alongside whatever Cursor's own index already gives you. This is a complement, not a replacement. Keep Cursor's indexing for similarity search, add Symvanta for structure: exact symbol resolution instead of pattern-matched guesses, a real call graph instead of a list of lines that mention a name, and blast radius before an edit instead of after the build breaks.

Setup

1. Create a free Symvanta account at symvanta.com.
2. Connect GitHub and pick the repositories to index. A webhook reindexes on every push, so the graph stays current without manual re-syncing. Plans start at $15/month, with a 7-day trial on Pro.
3. Add the Symvanta MCP server to Cursor. Cursor reads MCP config from .cursor/mcp.json in your project root (scoped to that project) or ~/.cursor/mcp.json in your home directory (available across all projects). For the project-level file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "symvanta": {
      "url": "https://mcp.symvanta.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

4. The first time Cursor's agent calls a Symvanta tool, it triggers an OAuth 2.0 (PKCE) browser login. Approve the connection once and Cursor holds the session for subsequent calls.
5. Cursor also lists connected MCP servers under Customize in the sidebar, where you can toggle individual tools on or off if you want to trim what the agent sees.

That's the whole setup: no separate daemon, no local index to keep warm. The graph lives on Symvanta's side and Cursor's agent queries it like any other MCP tool, and every push to a linked repository triggers a reindex through the webhook, so the graph the agent queries during a session matches the branch you're actually working on rather than a stale snapshot from last week.

If you'd rather keep the config out of the repo entirely, add the same block to ~/.cursor/mcp.json instead of the project file. The global file applies across every project Cursor opens on that machine, which is the better fit for a solo developer working across several repos; the project-level file is the better fit for a team that wants the MCP connection checked into version control alongside the code it's indexing.

What Cursor's agent gets

Supported languages: TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Java, Kotlin, C#, Go, Rust, Swift, PHP, and Ruby. These are 10 of 25 tools Symvanta exposes; the rest cover history, freshness checks, and library-level lookups.

Blast radius before you touch a shared function

Say Cursor's agent is asked to change the signature of a validateInput helper used by both the payment flow and the auth flow, three files apart, in a repo neither of you has fully memorized. Grep-and-guess retrieval finds every line containing validateInput, including a comment and an unrelated method with the same name on a different class. It doesn't tell you which calls are real.

With Symvanta wired in, the agent calls relate with kind: blast_radius on the function first. That returns the actual call sites across both flows, including any that route through an interface with a different name at the call site, before a single line changes. The same pattern applies to routing: if two controllers define near-duplicate handlers for /api/users/:id, find_http_route resolves the exact one that method and path actually hit, instead of the agent picking the more plausible-looking guess.

We go deeper on why this distinction exists at all in code embeddings vs. code graph, and you can see the same graph applied to real open-source repos on the architecture pages.

Frequently asked questions