Use Haypile from Claude Code

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.

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.