The AI Search / RAG Engineer

1. Start Here

   Before You Start

   This book is for engineers who build retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems: the assistants that answer questions from a company's own…

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2. Ch 1

   Why Search Came Back

   When large language models arrived, plenty of people predicted the end of search. The opposite happened. Retrieval moved inside the model's loop…

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3. Ch 2

   Anatomy of a RAG Pipeline

   "The answer was wrong" describes a symptom. A RAG system is five stages in a row, and a bad answer almost always traces back to one of them. This…

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4. Ch 3

   Ingest & Chunking

   Chunking gets little attention, and it sets a ceiling on everything after it. If an answer never ends up whole inside one retrievable piece, no…

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5. Ch 4

   Embeddings & Dense Retrieval

   An embedding turns text into a point in space where nearby points mean similar things. That idea powers semantic search, and it fails in specific…

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6. Ch 5

   Lexical & Hybrid Retrieval

   Most teams start with embeddings. The retrievers that do best in production usually run two systems, one matching words and one matching meaning…

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7. Ch 6

   Reranking

   Retrieval's job is to get the answer somewhere into the top 50. Reranking's job is to get it into the top 3. They're different problems, solved by…

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8. Ch 7

   Query Understanding & Transformation

   You've improved the index and the retriever. Many remaining failures come from the query itself: it's too short, too vague, or worded nothing like…

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9. Ch 8

   Evaluating Retrieval

   Chunk size, hybrid search, reranking and query rewriting are all settings you can change. Without measurement, changing them is guesswork. This…

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10. Ch 9

    Grounded Generation & Citations

    You retrieved the right chunks and ranked them first. The model can still ignore them, mix them with what it remembers from training, or state…

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11. Ch 10

    Production RAG

    A RAG system that tested well can decay in production without a single code change, because documents change, questions change and the index falls…

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12. Ch 11

    Advanced Retrieval

    The standard pipeline handles most questions. The ones it can't are filtered searches, multi-step questions and requests that shouldn't trigger…

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13. Ch 12

    Tools, Interviews & Hiring

    This chapter maps what you've learned onto the tools you'll name in interviews, walks through the questions you're likely to get, and closes with…

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