XERJ's CRAZY Local Search for AI Agents: I Tested It, It Broke, Then It Got AWESOME

XERJ is an open-source, local-first search engine and MCP server for AI coding agents. I installed it on my own Windows laptop, indexed real code, and report what worked and what broke. Repo: https://github.com/xerj-org/xerj (Apache-2.0). Version tested: v1.0.0-rc.98. Not tested: the README's 2.7x fewer-tokens study (their claim, not my result). Chapters: 0:00 The failure (cold open) 0:30 What XERJ is 1:13 The claim I did not test 1:48 Install, local first 2:21 Whole-repo index: the failure 3:16 Engine-folder index: the working run 3:45 Search quality and latency 5:27 Reference coding mini-tes