I get the reasoning behind “letting the agent use grep in a loop“, after all, it is very similar to how humans would explore a document base with ctrl-f. But wouldn’t humans also use vector search all the time if it were as available as ctrl-f? So maybe not ditch vector search but provide it as a tool to the agent. Increased complexity aside, letting the agent explore a huge document base with “vector search in a loop“ should be more powerful that with grep in a loop. Overall I liked the article.
My mental model (in the "all models are wrong, some are useful" sense) is that vector search is the thing that gives you the terms to grep for.
I like it. With this approach it feels like you also don’t need to fiddle as much with the details of your vector search and DB as that portion just gets you going and the actual retrieval happens with grep in a loop.
Or the thing that ranks the term based result. That’s the fun these days: it’s all whatever fits your problem.
Conceptually yes but practically speaking vector search results are generally not sufficiently good