The DB is stored locally, and any embedding, reranker and LLM will work. It's up to you if you self host these or bring them externally from one SaaS or the other
`chunkhound search <query>`, `chunkhound search --regex <query>` and `chunkhound research <query>` are the main cli entry points that you can already use today
Just add to your prompt something like "use code research", but yes there's a PR in the works that fixes that and optimizes the MCP tools interface - https://github.com/chunkhound/chunkhound/pull/150
ChunkHound does it a bit differently, since at true enterprise scale it's very slow and costly to pass all code chunks through an LLM during indexing time. Instead, ChunkHound implements a customized "deep research" algorithm that's been optimized for code exploration so it can answer, on demand, any deep technical question about the indexed codebase. This research agent can be powered by a lower tier LLM (think Haiku, Codex low, etc) that's already included in your subscription.