[melvinroest]

I have journaled digitally for the last 5 years with this expectation.

Recently I built a graphRAG app with Qwen 3.5 4b for small tasks like classifying what type of question I am asking or the entity extraction process itself, as graphRAG depends on extracted triplets (entity1, relationship_to, entity2). I used Qwen 3.5 27b for actually answering my questions.

It works pretty well. I have to be a bit patient but that’s it. So in that particular use case, I would agree.

I used MLX and my M1 64GB device. I found that MLX definitely works faster when it comes to extracting entities and triplets in batches.

[nkzd]

Did you get any insights about yourself from this process? I am thinking of doing the same

[melvinroest]

TL;DR: you don't need to do any treasure hunt on your notes by just typing stuff into the search bar. Having your own graphRAG system + LLM on your notes is basically a "Google" but then on your own notes. Any question you have: if you have a note for it, it will bubble up. The annoying thing is that false positives will also bubble up.

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Full reaction:

Yes but perhaps not in a way you might expect. Qwen's reasoning ability isn't exactly groundbreaking. But it's good enough to weave a story, provided it has some solid facts or notes. GraphRAG is definitely a good way to get some good facts, provided your notes are valuable to you and/or contain some good facts.

So the added value is that you now have a super charged information retrieval system on your notes with an LLM that can stitch loose facts reasonably well together, like a librarian would. It's also very easy to see hallucinations, if you recognize your own writing well, which I do.

The second thing is that I have a hard time rereading all my notes. I write a lot of notes, and don't have the time to reread any of them. So oftentimes I forget my own advice. Now that I have a super charged information retrieval system on my notes, whenever I ask a question: the graphRAG + LLM search for the most relevant notes related to my question. I've found that 20% of what I wrote is incredibly useful and is stuff that I forgot.

And there are nuggets of wisdom in there that are quite nuanced. For me specifically, I've seen insights in how I relate to work that I should do more with. I'll probably forget most things again but I can reuse my system and at some point I'll remember what I actually need to remember. For example, one thing I read was that work doesn't feel like work for me if I get to dive in, zoom out, dive in, zoom out. Because in the way I work as a person: that means I'm always resting and always have energy for the task that I'm doing. Another thing that it got me to do was to reboot a small meditation practice by using implementation intentions (e.g. "if I wake up then I meditate for at least a brief amount of time").

What also helps is to have a bit of a back and forth with your notes and then copy/paste the whole conversation in Claude to see if Claude has anything in its training data that might give some extra insight. It could also be that it just helps with firing off 10 search queries and finds a blog post that is useful to the conversation that you've had with your local LLM.