LLM Wiki vs. RAG: Measured Test Shows Wiki Slower Than Retrieval on Codebase Questions

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A developer built a markdown-based LLM wiki for the itsdangerous signing library and compared it with agentic retrieval over the raw source on four integration questions. Using Claude Code, the team measured wall-clock time, turns, and cost for each question with and without the wiki. Without the wiki, answers were faster and cheaper while equally correct. The wiki's advantage appeared only on a question whose answer was not contained in the source material. The author argues the two approaches differ in that RAG retrieves what was written, while a wiki also records decisions.

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