We replaced RAG with a virtual filesystem for our AI documentation assistant (mintlify.com) AI

Mintlify says it replaced RAG-based retrieval in its AI documentation assistant with a “virtual filesystem” that maps docs pages and sections to an in-memory directory tree and files. The assistant’s shell-like commands (e.g., ls, cd, cat, grep) are intercepted and translated into queries against the existing Chroma index, with page reassembly from chunks, caching, and RBAC-based pruning of inaccessible paths. By avoiding per-session sandbox startup and reusing the already-running Chroma database, the team reports cutting session boot time from about 46 seconds to ~100 milliseconds and reducing marginal compute cost.