alt Hacker NewsSo what's stopping me from using one of the million other versions of this that already exist? Or, even better, pointing Fable to your site and having it just develop its own version of this that I completely own?
I'm throwing in a bit of stank in those questions because I don't see anything here that's particularly unique, and keeping this closed and costly is just... absurd. I've vibe coded the same exact thing multiple times. It works, but it's only as useful as the philosophy of the person using it allows it to be.
So why would someone choose your solution? A vector database hosted in S3 is effectively trivial to set up at this point in time. What are you offering that I can't get from prompting a powerful enough model? If the answer to that question isn't the first thing people read when they open this post, then you can just consider all of this worthless and save yourself the hassle.
When I started, I was using what was available out in the world. The vector dbs I used and even the first version I built weren't really optimized to use RAM and resources conservatively. One of the aspects of Polign is it's optimized towards cold queries and only warms the cache when needed, all while keeping the recall accuracy in acceptable range. I accepted slower first-query latency on cold data as the tradeoff. For example, the demo serves 12.5 million passages from S3 with the server idling around 37 MiB RSS (I realized there is a 20 MB gcp sdk in there).
Hosted db have query costs that grow with the corpus, and self hosted have operational overheads. They do add up over time and I wanted cost flat, which took a while to get it right.
If a vibe-coded version covers your use case, you don't need this. I have added my own experience working and optimizing the storage into this, and Im certain it holds up well for a growing corpus and with simplicity to use it across multiple readers.