RAG vs the Giant Context Window: A Practitioner's Call
TeardownFor knowledge-heavy apps, retrieval still beats stuffing everything into a million-token prompt — on cost, freshness, and grounding.
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Your Long-Context Window Still Loses the Middle
TeardownFrontier models will swallow your whole knowledge base.
Open-Weight Agent Stack: Reliable Tools, Thin Autonomy
TeardownA hands-on teardown finds the open-weight agent stack ships dependable tool-calling for bounded tasks but recovers poorly on long chains; the verdict is use it for scoped workflows, wait on full autonomy.
Speculative Decoding: Where the Draft-Model Speedup Holds
TeardownA small draft model plus one parallel verification pass can cut latency 2-3x with identical outputs — but only when decoding is memory-bandwidth-bound…
QLoRA: One-GPU Fine-Tuning Without the Quality Tax
TeardownQuantized LoRA drops a 65B-model finetune from over 780GB to under 48GB of GPU memory.
Mixture-of-Experts in Production
TeardownMoE routing sells a compute discount your VRAM bill never sees.