Show HN: Cursor Buddy, get archived Cursor chats out of renderer RAM

Cursor Buddy, a new Cursor plugin by GitHub user professorpalmer, exports archived Cursor chats from the renderer's RAM into a local SQLite vault, reducing memory usage; on one Mac tested 28 Aug 2026, the renderer used 1.97 GB RSS before pruning, with the vault storing 232 chats and 13,577 searchable messages. The plugin provides MCP tools for searching and reading chats without loading them back into the renderer, and a prune command to delete archived rows from Cursor's database after quitting the app.

Cursor's Archive button hides chats. The rows stay in state.vscdb , and Cursor Helper Renderer keeps paying for them. This is a Cursor plugin not a standalone MCP dump : rules, skills, commands, logo, and an MCP server that searches a local SQLite vault. You ask “when did we talk about the memory leak?”; the agent pulls snippets . Ask for the whole transcript and it reads that chat into this conversation — not back into the renderer. Measured on one Mac, 28 Aug 2026, after export, before prune : renderer 1.97 GB RSS, state.vscdb 3.68 GB 233 archived + 79 active , vault 2.68 GB 232 chats, 13,577 searchable messages . Search is 1-10 ms. Your numbers will differ. | You want | Plugin surface | What RAM it uses | |---|---|---| | Find the chats | MCP search archive , /search-archive | Vault SQLite. Renderer unchanged. | | Read one chat | MCP read composer | Agent context in this thread. Still not the renderer. | | Shrink Cursor | /export-archived , Quit Cmd+Q , /prune-from-cursor | Deletes vaulted archived rows from state.vscdb . | Nothing is copied back into Cursor's live DB. Sidebar Archive is not this. This is not a second Portable LLM Wiki https://github.com/professorpalmer/portable-llm-wiki . The wiki is markdown pages, wikilinks , and Karpathy ingest. Buddy is a dump-and-query archive of Cursor composers. It steals the wiki's retrieval habits composer as page, skip hub chats, empty index stays empty , not the wiki product. Requires Python 3 on PATH the MCP server is stdio Python shipped inside the plugin . Cursor discovers Cursor Plugins from ~/.cursor/plugins/local when local plugin imports are allowed docs https://cursor.com/docs/plugins . git clone https://github.com/professorpalmer/cursor-buddy.git mkdir -p ~/.cursor/plugins/local rsync -a --delete --exclude .git cursor-buddy/ ~/.cursor/plugins/local/cursor-buddy/ Then Developer: Reload Window . Open Customize and confirm: - Plugin: Cursor Buddy - Rule: vault-not-live-db - Skill: archived-chats - Commands: /export-archived , /prune-from-cursor , /search-archive - MCP: cursor-buddy with list composers , search archive , read composer The bundled mcp.json uses python3 plus ${PLUGIN ROOT}/bin/cursor-buddy Agent Plugins spawn shape: interpolate PLUGIN ROOT in args / cwd , never in command . If MCP connects with 0 tools, Cursor is still starting the server with cwd = home and not expanding ${PLUGIN ROOT} . Set args 0 in ~/.cursor/plugins/local/cursor-buddy/mcp.json to that copy's absolute bin/cursor-buddy path and reload. Safe while Cursor is open python3 ~/.cursor/plugins/local/cursor-buddy/bin/cursor-buddy export Requires Cmd+Q first python3 ~/.cursor/plugins/local/cursor-buddy/bin/cursor-buddy prune dry-run python3 ~/.cursor/plugins/local/cursor-buddy/bin/cursor-buddy prune --apply Vault path: ~/Library/Application Support/cursor-buddy/vault.sqlite . Active unarchived chats are never exported or pruned. Marketplace listing after review : cursor.com/marketplace/publish https://cursor.com/marketplace/publish . | Kind | Path | |---|---| | Manifest | .cursor-plugin/plugin.json | | MCP | mcp.json → bin/cursor-buddy mcp | | Skill | skills/archived-chats/ | | Rule | rules/vault-not-live-db.mdc | | Commands | commands/ .md | | Hooks | hooks/hooks.json export on workspace/session | | Logo | assets/logo.svg | Archive in the sidebar still does not copy or delete anything. Buddy splits the job: Ingest safe while Cursor is open . export copies newly archived chats into the vault. Plugin hooks run that on workspaceOpen , sessionStart , and sessionEnd . Unchanged chats are skipped. Prune only after Cursor releases Never from a hook that runs while the app is open. Install a LaunchAgent that prunes once the DB is idle: state.vscdb . python3 ~/.cursor/plugins/local/cursor-buddy/bin/cursor-buddy install-automation If you archive a chat tonight, the next workspace open or agent session copies it. After you Quit Cmd+Q , leave Cursor closed for a minute so prune-if-idle can delete those rows VACUUM can take a bit on a large state.vscdb . Active chats are never touched. Manual export/prune still works. search archive keeps distinctive tokens length = 3, stop list , requires every token to appear in the same composer title or messages, not necessarily one bubble , and caps hits per composer so a 50k-bubble chat cannot fill the result. Stop-only queries return nothing. Tool bubbles with empty text are not indexed; composerData / plan blobs are not dumped into FTS. MIT