We replaced RAG with a virtual filesystem for our AI documentation assistant
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Re: We replaced RAG with a virtual filesystem for our AI documentation assistant
#2The real thing I think people are rediscovering with file system based search is that there’s a type of semantic search that’s not embedding based retrieval. One that looks more like how a librarian organizes files into shelves based on the domain.
We’re rediscovering forms of in search we’ve known about for decades. And it turns out they’re more interpretable to agents.
https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/01/08/semantic-search-wit...
Re: We replaced RAG with a virtual filesystem for our AI documentation assistant
#3This is definitely the way. There are good use cases for real sandboxes (if your agent is executing arbitrary code, you better it do so in an air-gapped environment).
But the idea of spinning up a whole VM to use unix IO primitives is way overkill. Makes way more sense to let the agent spit our unix-like tool calls and then use whatever your prod stack uses to do IO.
Re: We replaced RAG with a virtual filesystem for our AI documentation assistant
#4The real thing I think people are rediscovering with file system based search is that there’s a type of semantic search that’s not embedding based retrieval. One that looks more like how a librarian organizes files into shelves based on the domain. We’re rediscovering forms of in search we’ve known about for decades. And it turns out they’re more interpretable to agents. https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/01/08/seman…
Turns out the millions of people in knowledge work arent librarians and they wing shit everywhere
Re: We replaced RAG with a virtual filesystem for our AI documentation assistant
#5The real thing I think people are rediscovering with file system based search is that there’s a type of semantic search that’s not embedding based retrieval. One that looks more like how a librarian organizes files into shelves based on the domain. We’re rediscovering forms of in search we’ve known about for decades. And it turns out they’re more interpretable to agents. https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/01/08/seman…
Someone simply assumed at some point that RAG must be based on vector search, and everyone followed.
Re: We replaced RAG with a virtual filesystem for our AI documentation assistant
#6The real thing I think people are rediscovering with file system based search is that there’s a type of semantic search that’s not embedding based retrieval. One that looks more like how a librarian organizes files into shelves based on the domain. We’re rediscovering forms of in search we’ve known about for decades. And it turns out they’re more interpretable to agents. https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/01/08/seman…
This kind of circles back to ontological NLP, that was using knowledge representation as a primitive for language processing. There is _a ton_ of work in that direction.
Re: We replaced RAG with a virtual filesystem for our AI documentation assistant
#7Let's say I want a free, local or free-tier-llm, simple solution to search information mostly from my emails and a little bit from text, doc and pdf files. Are there any tool I should try to have ollamma or gemini able to reply with my own knowledge base?
Re: We replaced RAG with a virtual filesystem for our AI documentation assistant
#8The real thing I think people are rediscovering with file system based search is that there’s a type of semantic search that’s not embedding based retrieval. One that looks more like how a librarian organizes files into shelves based on the domain. We’re rediscovering forms of in search we’ve known about for decades. And it turns out they’re more interpretable to agents. https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/01/08/seman…
Inverted indexes have the major advantages of supporting Boolean operators.
Re: We replaced RAG with a virtual filesystem for our AI documentation assistant
#9[deleted]
Re: We replaced RAG with a virtual filesystem for our AI documentation assistant
#10The real thing I think people are rediscovering with file system based search is that there’s a type of semantic search that’s not embedding based retrieval. One that looks more like how a librarian organizes files into shelves based on the domain. We’re rediscovering forms of in search we’ve known about for decades. And it turns out they’re more interpretable to agents. https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/01/08/seman…
Someone simply assumed at some point that RAG must be based on vector search, and everyone followed.
Doesn't have to be tho, I've had great success letting an agent loose on an Apache Lucene instance. Turns out LLMs are great at building queries.