Feynman said it best, as he usually did: the pleasure of finding things out. Not the pleasure of having found things out. The pleasure is in the finding — in the moment of confusion resolving into clarity, in the conceptual structure snapping into place, in understanding why something works the way it works. It's a physical sensation. If you've had it, you know what I mean.
The RAG I almost never use
I built the cosmology RAG because I was reading the same papers too many times. Every few months I'd encounter a reference to some result — the Hubble tension, or the baryon acoustic oscillation measurement from DESI — and spend twenty minutes trying to remember which paper I'd read about it, where I'd filed my notes, what conclusion I'd reached. The system I built solved this problem. I can now query 500+ papers in seconds and get the context I need.
And I've used it about thirty times in the two years since I built it.
I kept waiting for the use case to expand and it didn't. What I realized, slowly, is that the re-reading wasn't the problem. The re-reading was the point. The second time you encounter a paper you've already processed, you're not reading for information. You're reading because your understanding has changed since the first time you read it, and the paper looks different now. You're checking your current model against the source. The serendipity of encountering the same idea twice from different angles is part of how the ideas become yours.
I've been more careful about this since. Automation is the right tool for toil — for the tasks that are genuinely repetitive, genuinely low-information, genuinely just friction between you and something you care about. The question I try to ask now before automating anything is: is this friction actually protecting something?
When I was reading those cosmology papers over and over, the friction was protecting my engagement with the material. The "inefficiency" of re-reading was the process of actually learning something. Removing it with a RAG system made the information more accessible and the understanding shallower. I got faster access to conclusions and slower access to comprehension.
Automate the logistics, not the engagement
The principle I've landed on: automate the logistics, not the engagement. Automate the task of finding the paper. Don't automate the experience of reading it. Automate the task of scheduling the meeting. Don't automate the conversation. Automate the task of processing the transaction. Don't automate the judgment that decided to make it.
Feynman would have made an excellent case for this distinction. He was famously resistant to anything that sped up thinking at the cost of understanding. He didn't want to know the answer. He wanted to figure out the answer. There's a difference between those two things that gets lost very quickly when you make finding out frictionless.