Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by i3oi3 113 days ago
Interesting approach. I just finished some work for a similar task in a different domain.

One thing that surprised me: tantivy's BM25 search is faster, more expressive, and more scalable than SQLite. If you're just building a local search (or want to optimize for local FTS), I would strongly recommend looking into tantivy.

If you have the resources, it would be very interesting to throw a some models (especially smart-but-context-constrained cheaper ones) at some of the benchmark programming problems and see if this approach can show an effective improvement.

1 comments

On Tantivy: Agree it's the better search engine, but context-mode is session-scoped — DB is a temp file that dies when the process exits. At that scale (50-200 chunks), FTS5 is zero-config, single-file, <1ms startup, and good enough. If we ever add persistent cross-session indexing, Tantivy would be the move.

On benchmarking: This is the experiment I most want to see. The hypothesis: context-mode benefits smaller models disproportionately — a 32K model with clean context could outperform a 200K model drowning in raw tool output. Would love to see SWE-bench results with context-mode on vs. off across model tiers.