why your coding agents don't need rag anymore nik pash from cline explained why he no longer recommends rag for autonomous coding agents, and his points hit harder than i expected. the application layer is shrinking. all the clever engineering we build around llms keeps becoming obsolete as models improve. what's happening with rag: context windows expanded dramatically, making embedding search unnecessary coding agents work better with direct file access than chunked embeddings hallucinations aren't even a problem when you set temperature to 0 security concerns with embedding storage are significant instead of rag, modern coding agents like klein use what nik calls "narrative integrity". letting the agent explore code organically through tools like grep, reading files in full, and following its own train of thought. this mimics how senior engineers actually work. even cloud code's boris admitted they tried rag and abandoned it. the pattern is clear. when rag still makes sense: budget constraints (embedding search uses fewer tokens) massive unstructured data lakes some non-coding use cases but for serious engineering teams? stop distracting your coding agents with embedding search. let them read the code directly, build understanding naturally, and execute with focus. the real question isn't whether rag is dead, it's whether you're still clinging to outdated solutions when simpler approaches now work better.