#rag
Every post tagged "rag".
8 posts · showing 1–8
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One Query Is Rarely Enough: Iterative Retrieval for Agents
The search wasn't broken — it answered the question as typed, which isn't the question that was asked. Making retrieval a tool the agent calls repeatedly needs one signal most retrievers refuse to give.
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The Sales-Research Agent and the Problem of Stale Facts
Every fact in the brief had been true. None was labelled with when — so someone opened a call congratulating a person on a role they'd left a year ago.
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When Memory Makes an Agent Worse
Every retrieved memory is content injected into the context, relevant or not. Three ways that degrades the agent — including the one where it argues with a user about their own stated preference.
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Chunking for Agents Is Not Chunking for Search
Search results are read by a person who fills in the gaps. An agent doesn't — it acts on the fragment. That one difference changes how you chunk, how many you return, and what "no results" should mean.
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Vector Database or Postgres? Choosing Storage for Agent Memory
Most agent memory reads are filtered similarity or plain structured lookup — relational workloads wearing an embedding. Write down your ten most common retrievals before you add a second database.
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The Research Agent That Cited the Wrong Page
Every source was real and had been read. Two citations still pointed at the wrong page — one at a source that disagreed. Attribution is a lookup, and generation isn't a lookup.
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What Belongs in Long-Term Memory (and What's Just Transcript)
Embedding every turn gives you a transcript with a search box, not memory. Three categories deserve to outlive a conversation — and the contradiction problem needs deciding before it arrives, not after.
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Trim, Summarize, or Retrieve? Three Ways to Survive a Long Agent Run
Trimming loses the oldest information, summarizing loses specificity, retrieval loses whatever the query missed. Which loss your run can survive is the whole decision — plus one rule that prevents most long-run failures.