Building the RAG Pipeline

Wire it all together end-to-end

🔑 Key Concepts

Pipeline flow — Query → Rewrite → Retrieve → Rerank → Construct Prompt → Generate → Cite Sources.
Query rewriting — Expand abbreviations, add context, generate sub-queries. Bridges the vocabulary gap between users and docs.
Prompt construction — System instructions + retrieved context + user question. Use clear delimiters (---) to separate sections.
Citation instruction — 'Answer based ONLY on the context below. Cite sources as [filename]. If context doesn't contain the answer, say so.'

💡 Practice: Try implementing each concept yourself before moving on. Reading about RAG and building RAG are very different things.