From B-trees to vector DBs back to grep: a viral joke skewers RAG's full circle
burny_tech · x · 2026-09-20
A viral joke tracing three decades of search technology:
- 1990s: B+ trees and inverted indexes — nothing takes more than seconds to find.
- 2010s: distributed full-text search hits billions of logs in milliseconds.
- 2025: chop documents into tiny chunks, burn massive compute on embeddings, stuff retrieved text into a model, and pray it doesn't hallucinate.
- 2026: the LLM itself concludes — this find and grep tool is really nice.
The punchline mocks today's RAG pipelines: huge spend on vector retrieval, only for classic text-search tools to become the model's favorite instruments again.
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