I built a small MCP server called Codicil that indexes docs in a repo and lets an AI coding assistant search them instead of guessing. Runbooks, config notes, whatever I've written down about my homelab. It's just for me, one repo, one user, nobody else touches it.
For months it ran against a real Ollama box doing embeddings with nomic-embed-text, so every query was an actual semantic search over vectors. Then I decommissioned that box for unrelated reasons and the embedding endpoint went dark.
I didn't notice for something like two weeks. Queries still came back with reasonable answers so I just kept using it. Turns out it had fallen back to grepping the raw files the whole time, and it never said a word about it.
I don't remember exactly what tipped me off at this point, just that at some point I went looking and realized it had been running on keyword fallback for a while.
Honestly my first thought was that this is a little embarrassing. I'm the only person who uses this thing, so I'm also the only monitoring it has, and I went two weeks without checking. But then I actually looked at why it didn't just break, and that part I don't think is embarrassing at all.
