vellum MCP is a self-hosted server over a folder of markdown, your agent's memory as plain .md files you own. Search is the feature everyone expects to be "solved" by a library: bolt on bleve or a vector index and move on.
I never did. Search is a ranked scan over the notes, held in RAM. No engine, no index to build. Bragging about not adding a dependency is a strange flex, so let me show you what that plain scan actually costs, and how one optimization pass later it runs about 5× faster than my first honest cut of it. This is the case for the boring option.
The heavy default
A bundled search engine sounds like the responsible choice, and for a large enough corpus it is. But look at what it actually drags in for a personal note vault:
an index to build and keep in sync with the files, a second source of truth that can drift, or corrupt
