Local Models Are More Accurate With RAG

Spiritual-Market-741 · reddit · 2026-07-08

The author tested the accuracy of local LLMs in answering technical questions, concluding that performance is average without RAG but improves significantly with it. "Thinking" mode offered little help but considerably slowed down processing. The experiment involved downloading documentation from GitHub projects like Node, LangChain.js, TypeScript, transformers.js, and Vue. Multiple-choice questions were generated using deepseek-v4-flash, and comparative evaluations were conducted using the unsloth gemma QAT model under three conditions: no retrieval, with correct documents, and with a self-built RAG system. The author also mentioned that subsequent experiments included Apple Intelligence and Qwen models.

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