Glossary

Agentic retrieval

Agentic retrieval lets the model search iteratively (look, refine the query, look again) rather than retrieving a fixed top-k once and answering. In 2026 this is the dominant reframing of RAG: Anthropic's Claude Code dropped vector search for agentic file search (grep, glob, read). It shines on bounded, structured knowledge where exactness matters.

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