THE RAG OBITUARY: KILLED BY AGENTS, BURIED BY CONTEXT WINDOWS

Summary from the TLDR Founders newsletter

A founder built a financial search engine using the standard playbook - break documents into chunks, turn them into vectors, search, rerank, feed results to an AI. It took three years and constant maintenance. Then he tried Claude Code and realized it just searched files directly with grep, a tool from 1973, and got better results. The entire retrieval infrastructure was solving a problem that no longer exists. Early AI could only read 12 pages at once, so you had to find the right fragments. Now it can read 6,000 pages, so it just reads everything and investigates like a human would.