Advanced RAG

Once basic retrieval works, most gains come from data quality, indexing discipline, and retrieval design rather than endlessly rewriting prompts.

Focus Areas

Source quality

Clean, current documents outperform larger noisy corpora almost every time.

Scope control

Use separate knowledge bases for different domains when possible.

Retrieval tuning

Review:

• chunk size
• metadata quality
• vector backend choice
• reranking behavior

Prompt grounding

Make it explicit when the agent should:

• rely on retrieved context
• admit missing context
• avoid inventing specifics

Practical Advice

• fix ingestion quality before tuning the model
• prefer one clean retrieval domain over one giant mixed corpus
• validate grounded answers with real user questions, not toy prompts