Tag

#RAG

October 6, 20264 min read

Telling users the truth about ingest time

In short: a tool that runs local models on a laptop is slow at bulk work, and a large photo import can run for hours, often overnight. I put that sentence near the top of the setup guide, before the…

September 8, 20265 min read

Grounded answers or honest refusals: a rule for retrieval over personal files

In short: when a system answers questions over someone's own files, there is one rule I would not trade for anything: every answer quotes the person's own sources verbatim, or it is an honest refusal.…

August 25, 20265 min read

A second legal system: what breaks when a legal pipeline changes country

In short: taking a legal pipeline built for Canadian law to a second legal system is less about code that crashes than about assumptions: that a document is in English unless told otherwise, that a…

May 5, 20264 min read

Citations that point at the wrong paragraph

In short: a citation can be wrong in at least seven different ways, and only two of them involve the model. Most come from how long documents were cut into chunks. Name each failure, and give each one…

April 21, 20265 min read

When BM25 beat the embeddings

In short: on legal text, a keyword ranking function from the 1990s wins a whole class of queries that dense embeddings lose: citations, section numbers, defined terms. I run both and fuse the…

April 7, 20265 min read

How I evaluate retrieval before anyone asks a question

In short: before a single user types a question, I write the questions myself, mark which passage answers each one, and measure how often that passage comes back in the top k. That one number, recall…

March 24, 20265 min read

Laws have versions, and most RAG pretends they don't

In short: a section of a statute is not one text, it's a series of texts, each in force for a stretch of time. If your retrieval only knows the current one, it will answer a question about 2021 with…

March 10, 20265 min read

Ingesting a country's law when every province has its own format

In short: Canada's legislation lives on a different website for nearly every province and territory, as PDFs, Word files, an XML API and plain web pages. When a product depends on that text, the…

January 13, 20265 min read

RAG with a persona: when the knowledge base and the character disagree

In short: when a character and its knowledge base disagree, let the knowledge base win on content and the character win on voice, and let safety rules beat both. You enforce that in how you build the…