Posts tagged: Opinion
What actually holds up in production — retrieval, cost, deployment, and the tradeoffs nobody puts in the sales deck. Written from client work and our own builds.
Open weights, September 2026: close to the frontier, but not level with it
In July, the best model you could download scored within four points of the best one you could rent. Today the gap is twelve. Both numbers are true, and the difference between them is the most useful thing to understand before you choose.
Read the post →Long context didn't kill RAG — it changed what RAG is for
Every time a model ships a bigger context window, someone declares retrieval obsolete. Then they try to put a real corpus in the prompt and rediscover, at $1.50 a question, why retrieval exists.
Read the post →The local-vs-cloud cost argument is usually wrong
Most teams justify on-prem AI with a token-cost spreadsheet. Run the numbers honestly and cloud usually wins on cost alone — which means the real reasons to go local are the ones nobody puts in the deck.
Read the post →One post a month, no pitching
Practical notes on private and local LLM systems — hardware, retrieval and costs — in English and Vietnamese. Unsubscribe any time.
Have a workflow you're trying to figure out?
Book a 30-minute discovery call. We'll map it and tell you straight whether it belongs on your hardware or on a cloud API.