Comment by mattnewton
Comment by mattnewton 2 days ago
I recently wrote a short anecdote in a similar vein- in my testing, “agentic” retrieval where you simply pass an annotated list of files to an LLM and ask it which ones it wants to look at is probably better than traditional RAG for small datasets (few hundreds of docs).
I found it was both much simpler and more accurate at the cost of marginally more time and tokens, compared to RAG on embedded chunks with a vector store.
Shameless plug- https://www.matthewnewton.com/blog/replacing-rag
I was daunted by the amount of components that goes into a basic RAG. I also ended up starting with "agentic retrieval", which I invented. And it seems that many others have invented same/similar thing. It is just so much easier to start with something simple and improve later on.