Obsidian Metadata
| type | source |
| url | https://pashpashpash.substack.com/p/why-i-no-longer-recommend-rag-for |
| authors | Nik Pash (Cline) |
| published | 2025-05-23 |
Source: Why I No Longer Recommend RAG for Autonomous Coding Agents (Nik Pash)
URL: https://pashpashpash.substack.com/p/why-i-no-longer-recommend-rag-for
For quality-focused autonomous coding agents, chunk-embed-cosine RAG is “a black hole” and a distraction that dilutes the model’s judgment with chunked snippets. Senior engineers explore codebases by walking folders, reading imports, and following references, so give agents those tools (Cline: folder trees, AST parsing, agentic exploration). “Retrieval is passive; agency is active.” RAG still makes sense for cost-optimized tools and for support bots, document Q&A, and memory.
The FAQ reads this as an argument against naive vector retrieval for coding agents, not against RAG. → Is RAG Dead