J agentic coding search tool

[Thomas McGuire]

I have set up an MCP search tool of the source available on the JSoftware.com website that Chris Burke had mentioned is available to download.

I put it on a cheap vultr.com cloud server you can access it at http://149.28.36.187:9500

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For Claude code you can add it on a project basis by running the following command in your working directory before you start up the full Claude user interface: 

claude mcp add --transport http recoll http://149.28.36.187:9500/mcp

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For Grok CLI access you created a settings.json file

vi ~/.config/grok/settings.json

 and paste the following: 

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "recoll": {
      "url": "http://149.28.36.187:9500",
      "name": "Recoll Search"
    }
  }
}

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For other agentic interfaces the above should give you enough information to set up the MCP connection.

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Some tips about using the tool: 

The basis of the search engine is the recoll.org software that uses Xapian to index all the files available in the JSoftware site distribution. You can use natural language to search for a topic or code that may be available. This will usually generate a considerable number of file hits to then read. 

I use subagents that use a different LLM that has good reasoning but are cheaper than the frontier models. I have the frontier model initiate the search and tell it to give the files to the subagent to read, summarize, give a rating on relevance, pull out any code, and give it back to the frontier model to pick the best few to further investigate. This method is very good because it keeps control of the context size and you don't muddy the context of the main frontier model with non-relevant information. 

I haven't had a chance to use it other than minimal testing at this point. Most of my work has been to get this up and running. 

Have fun with it

Tom McGuire

[Thomas McGuire]

I have set up a second search tool of the old forum email list on port 9600 on the same machine. http://149.28.36.187:9600. By virtue of the server application I am using from Glama.ai, it wants to use an API_KEY. So I made the API_KEY JSoftwareMailArchive001. You can see its use in claude below. 

To add it to a claude project: 

claude mcp add --transport http JMail http://149.28.36.187:9600/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer JSoftwareMailArchive001"

I wanted to get this out there since most people are likely using claude code. Once I verify the setup for Grok CLI I will add it to this thread. 

Tom

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