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Production RAG: what I learned from processing 5M+ documents

blog.abdellatif.io

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Re: Production RAG: what I learned from processing 5M+ documents

#2
Thanks for sharing. TIL about rerankers.

Chunking strategy is a big issue. I found acceptable results by shoving large texts to to gemini flash and have it summarize and extract chunks instead of whatever text splitter I tried. I use the method published by Anthropic https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/contextual-retrieval i.e. include full summary along with chunks for each embedding.

I also created a tool to enable the LLM to do vector search on its own .

I do not use Langchain or python.. I use Clojure+ LLMs' REST APIs.

Re: Production RAG: what I learned from processing 5M+ documents

#3
I have a RAG setup that doesn't work on documents but other data points that we use for generation (the original data is call recordings but it is heavily processed to just a few text chunks). Instead of a reranker model we do vector search and then simply ask GPT-5 in an extra call which of the results is the most relevant to the input question. Is there an advantage to actual reranker models rather than using a generic LLM?

Re: Production RAG: what I learned from processing 5M+ documents

#4

I have a RAG setup that doesn't work on documents but other data points that we use for generation (the original data is call recordings but it is heavily processed to just a few text chunks). Instead of a reranker model we do vector search and then simply ask GPT-5 in an extra call which of the results is the most relevant to the input question. Is there an advantage to actual reranker models rather than using a gen…

OP here. rerankers are finetuned small models, they're cheap and very fast compared to an additional GPT-5 call.

Re: Production RAG: what I learned from processing 5M+ documents

#6

Thanks for sharing. TIL about rerankers. Chunking strategy is a big issue. I found acceptable results by shoving large texts to to gemini flash and have it summarize and extract chunks instead of whatever text splitter I tried. I use the method published by Anthropic https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/contextual-retrieval i.e. include full summary along with chunks for each embedding. I also created a tool to enab…

Have you measured your latency, and how sensitive are you to it?

Re: Production RAG: what I learned from processing 5M+ documents

#8

> What moved the needle: Query Generation What does query generation mean in this context, it’s probably not SQL queries right?

It's described in the remainder of the point - they use an LLM to generate additional search queries, either rephrasings of the user's query or bringing additional context from the chat history.

Re: Production RAG: what I learned from processing 5M+ documents

#9
post #5

They say the chunker is the most important part, but theirs looks rudimentary: https://github.com/agentset-ai/agentset/blob/main/packages/e... That is, there is nothing here that one could not easily write without a library.

OP here. We've been working on agentset.ai full-time for 2 months. The product now gets you something working quite well out of the box. Better than most people with no experience in RAG (I'd say so with confidence).

Ingestion + Agentic Search are two areas that we're focused on in the short term.

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