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Show HN: Vectorless, Reasoning-Based RAG

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PageIndex is a retrieval-augmented generation engine that rejects vector similarity search in favor of a hierarchical tree index that an LLM "reasons" through, mirroring how a human reader scans a long report. Documents are turned into a tree-structured index (index step) and an agentic LLM searches that tree (retrieve step), so retrieval is based on multi-step relevance reasoning rather than nearest-neighbor embedding matches. That design yields traceable, explainable citations, preserves full conversational and domain context, and avoids chunking into isolated vectors. Recommended usage separates models: a basic model for index summarization and a stronger chat model for tree search; the SDK supports local and cloud modes and integrates with agent frameworks.

Benchmarks and specifics demonstrate practical gains: local indexing costs roughly $0.001 per page and takes about 13 seconds to 4.5 minutes for documents from 9 to 1,098 pages; queries read only reached nodes so per-query cost stays flat with document length. Passing entire PDFs costs 2.1× to 16.6× more for mid-to-large docs and exceeds context windows at very large sizes. On FinanceBench, PageIndex achieved 98.7% accuracy versus ~50% for vector RAG. Cloud adds OCR, image understanding, block-level citations and a PageIndex File System to scale to millions of documents while keeping chat/model choice compatible with existing stacks.

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