A 150-row benchmark grid looks like the output of a robot having a stroke — until you know the three things each row tells you. A field guide to reading our RAG bake-off: read the parametric floor first, decode the system and lane columns, and ask the only two questions that matter — is it right, and what did it cost?
One failing LoCoMo question turned into a cross-corpus, multi-system benchmark — and a pile of retracted conclusions. Small-N runs lie, cross-vendor numbers are rarely apples-to-apples, and a correctness bug will impersonate an architecture win every time. Run the no-context baseline, 6x your sample, and diff the bytes that reach the model before you trust any RAG number.
The hands-on follow-up to the why-I-built-it post. Real commands, real outputs: install Stele, wire it into your agent, store artifacts with citations, supersede facts, time-travel with as_of, stash oversized tool output, and run recall through two strategies. Five minutes to install, the rest is just typing.
I said the implementation needed another quarter. Three weeks later I’d shipped Stele — source-backed, time-traveling, sovereign agent memory that plugs into seven coding assistants. What it does, the three goals driving it, what’s solid on main, and what’s still wobbly. The honest version, including the parts that aren’t built yet.
