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New in Kumbukum: faster MCP, sturdier search, self-hostable observability

25 May 2026 · 2 min read
New in Kumbukum: faster MCP, sturdier search, self-hostable observability

The last few weeks brought a wave of plumbing work to Kumbukum — the kind of changes you don't see in screenshots but feel every time you search, sync, or open the MCP. Here's what landed.

MCP: faster, scoped, and more reliable

A lot of work went into the Model Context Protocol layer that connects Claude, Cursor, and friends to your memory.

  • Faster boot — the MCP bootstrap cache TTL got bumped and the search path was rewritten to use embedding-only retrieval with app-side dedup. Cold-start and search hangs are gone.
  • Project-scoped retrieval — recall_memory and search_notes now accept a project_id filter, so multi-project setups don't bleed context across boundaries.
  • OAuth that works everywhere — private_key_jwt support, native redirect URI handling, and proper session scoping landed for MCP OAuth, so editor integrations connect cleanly.
  • No more parse hangs — C1 and control characters are now stripped at write time and from search output, fixing the rare case where a stray byte stalled the client.

Search reliability

Typesense — the engine behind Kumbukum's hybrid search — got several hardening passes. Retry config now honors numRetries with a 2-second failover, documents are sanitized before indexing, and the client config was simplified to just connectionTimeoutSeconds. Search just works, even on messy inputs.

Observability you can actually self-host

Optional OpenObserve and Clickstack integrations are in. If you self-host Kumbukum and want logs, traces, and metrics without sending data to a vendor, you can wire either one up with environment variables. Sentry and OpenTelemetry stayed in step with the latest releases too.

Crawling pager

URL ingestion now pages through large sites properly, so saving a domain doesn't stop after the first batch. Useful for crawling docs sites or reference material into a project.

Under the hood

  • Upgraded to pnpm v11 across the monorepo.
  • Dedicated Claude Code docs at https://app.kumbukum.com/docs/.
  • Blocking Stop hook documented for guaranteed memory writes when an agent session ends.
  • Dozens of small UI refinements across the app.

What's next

A much bigger announcement is coming separately — Kumbukum is growing two new surfaces, email and the browser, that turn your inbox and your tabs into first-class memory. Watch this space.

If you're already running Kumbukum, pull the latest. If you're not yet, grab an account or self-host from GitHub. As always, we build in public — issues, PRs, and Discord thoughts welcome.