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Posted by andros 2 days ago

From zero to a RAG system: successes and failures(en.andros.dev)
247 points | 77 commentspage 3
aledevv 10 hours ago|
I made something similar in my project. My more difficult task has been choice the right approach to chunking long documents. I used both structural and semantic chunking approach. The semantic one helped to better store vectors in vectorial DB. I used QDrant and openAi embedding model.
brcmthrowaway 6 hours ago||
What was the system prompt?
smrtinsert 8 hours ago||
What would it look like to regularly react to source data changes? Seems like a big missing piece. Event based? regular cadence? Curious what people choose. Great post though.
ravikirany22 6 hours ago||
For code specifically this is the hardest part — the "source data" (the codebase) changes constantly with every commit, but the AI config files that describe it don't update automatically.The approach that works best is AST-diffing rather than hash-based reindexing — you can detect semantic changes (function renamed, interface deleted) rather than just textual changes, which gives you much more precise invalidation signals.
stingraycharles 8 hours ago||
Depends on the use case, ie frequency and impact of changes.

Typically you would have a reindex process, and you keep track of hashes of chunks to check if you’ve already calculated this exact block before to avoid extra costs. And then run such a reindex process pretty frequently as it’s cheap / costs nothing when there are no changes.

smrtinsert 7 hours ago||
makes great sense, thanks!
KPGv2 7 hours ago||
This article came just in the nick of time. I'm in fandoms that lean heavily into fanfiction, and there's a LOT out there on Ao3. Ao3 has the worst search (and yo can't even search your account's history!), so I've been wanting to create something like this as a tool for the fandom, where we can query "what was the fic about XYZ where ABC happened?" and get hopefully helpful responses. I'm very tired of not being able to do this, and it would be a fun learning experience.

I've already got the data mostly structured because I did some research on the fandom last year, charting trends and such, so I don't even need to massage the data. I've got authors, dates, chapters, reader comments, and full text already in a local SQLite db.

nossid 6 hours ago|
If you didn't already see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44878151 (Building a web search engine from scratch in two months with 3 billion neural embeddings), then you might enjoy it, even if it's way overkill for your use case.
redwood 8 hours ago||
Cool to see Nomic embeddings mentioned. Though surpriser you didn't land on Voyage.

Did you look at Turbopuffer btw?

austinthetaco 7 hours ago|
i assume based on their concerns of the hetzner pricing that they didnt want to pay for voyage/turbopuffer. unless there are free versions of those products that I'm unaware of, but I'm only seeing paid.
felixagentai 3 hours ago||
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maxothex 6 hours ago||
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aplomb1026 4 hours ago||
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philbitt 7 hours ago||
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leontloveless 6 hours ago|
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