Local LLM users pivot to MCP, long context

The "janky RAG" era is maturing into a standardized local-first stack that prioritizes interoperability over custom scripts.

• –MCP has become the universal bridge between local LLMs and personal data, allowing models to "plug in" to persistent memory like ChromaDB on demand.
• –Hardware-accelerated subquadratic attention is making 1M+ context windows viable on consumer hardware, reducing reliance on lossy semantic search for medium-sized datasets.
• –Scaling beyond a handful of documents still highlights the "needle in the haystack" problem, where traditional vector retrieval often fails without the support of modern rerankers or high-density context.