Comment by shad42

IMO RAG is mostly dead. The game changer with newer models like Opus is the reasoning. So instead of pushing all the context up front (RAG style), it's better to give strong primitives (eg. bash, SQL) and let the agent figure it out.

It's what Claude Code is doing now and the principles we applied for Mendral as well.

That said, you're right that some smaller models can outperform Haiku and we're thinking supporting oss models at some point. But it does not change the core design principles IMO.