Haypile's daemon speaks MCP (Model Context Protocol), the standard way to expose tools to AI agents. Once connected, Claude Code can search your indexed documents whenever a question calls for it: "what does our Meridian contract say about termination?" becomes answerable inside your editor, grounded in your actual files, with citations.

Connect Claude Code

One command:

claude mcp add --transport http haypile http://localhost:11500/mcp

That is the whole setup. Claude Code now sees two tools:

search_documents: hybrid search over everything you have indexed, returning cited passages
list_sources: what folders are indexed, so the agent knows what it can search

Make sure something is indexed (hay add ~/Documents) and the daemon is running. It starts automatically on hay add and stays up.

Per-project setup with hay init

For a project or case folder, hay init writes a .mcp.json in the folder:

cd ~/cases/acme-litigation
hay init

Claude Code picks up .mcp.json automatically when opened in that folder. Anyone who clones or opens the project gets the integration without running the claude mcp add command themselves.

Cursor and other editors

Any MCP client that supports the Streamable HTTP transport can use the same endpoint: http://localhost:11500/mcp. For clients that prefer launching a process (stdio transport), configure:

{
  "command": "hay",
  "args": ["mcp-stdio"]
}

hay mcp-stdio bridges stdio to the daemon and auto-starts it if needed.

MCP bundles

Every release also ships one .mcpb MCP Bundle per platform, on the releases page. An .mcpb is a zip with a manifest that MCP clients, the official MCP registry, and Smithery understand: install it and the client launches hay mcp-stdio itself, no separate binary install or config file needed. Useful for clients that install servers from a bundle rather than a command line; on a machine where you also want the CLI, the normal install is still the way.

Discovery endpoints for agents

An agent pointed at haypile.sh can learn all of this without scraping HTML:

Every docs page has a Markdown twin: append .md to the URL, or send Accept: text/markdown. /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt index them.
/.well-known/mcp.json is the MCP server card: packages to install and the local endpoint to connect to.
/.well-known/api-catalog (RFC 9727) points at the API and MCP documentation.
/.well-known/agent-skills/index.json lists the Haypile skill file agents can load.

The docs site itself also exposes two in-browser (WebMCP) tools to agents that drive a browser: search_haypile_docs and get_haypile_install_command.

A privacy note worth understanding

Haypile itself makes zero external connections; that does not change here. But an MCP client is a separate program with its own behavior: when Claude Code calls search_documents, the passages that come back become part of Claude's context, which is sent to Anthropic like the rest of your conversation. Connecting an AI agent to your documents is a choice about that agent, not a change in what Haypile does. For fully offline question answering, use hay ask with a local LLM instead.

Try it

Open a Claude Code session in a folder with an indexed project and ask something only your documents can answer:

what did we agree with the vendor about payment terms?

Claude will call search_documents, read the cited passages, and answer from them. The citations flow through, so you can verify against the source file.

Use Haypile from Claude Code