标签：#rag

Traditional content pages are often designed for a linear reader. The introduction sets context, the middle develops the idea, and the conclusion ties everything together. AI retrieval does not always work that way. A system may identify smaller content units, pull the most relevant section, compare it with other sources, and use that fragment to support an answer. The full page still matters, but the retrievable blocks inside the page matter just as much. A useful Tumblr post explains the idea in simple terms: https://www.tumblr.com/digitalisedsoul/820825642809573376/ai-does-not-read-your-content-like-a-human?source=share For Dev Community readers, the pattern is familiar. Poorly structured inputs lead to weaker outputs. If content is dense, vague, or dependent on surrounding paragraphs, it becomes harder to extract and reuse. If content is modular, clear, and properly scoped, retrieval becomes easier. Marketing teams can learn a lot from this. A strong content page should behave like a set of well labelled components. Each section should answer a specific question. Headings should be descriptive, not decorative. Paragraphs should avoid vague references such as the above point or this approach when the section may be read independently. Definitions should appear close to the terms they explain. Examples should include enough context to stand alone. Proof should be written as text, not only displayed as graphics. Internal links should connect related concepts in a way that helps both readers and systems understand the topic map. A page about AI search visibility, for example, should not only include one broad explanation. It should break the topic into useful blocks: what AI visibility means, why AI systems retrieve passages, how source trust works, what makes content reusable, and how brands should measure answer presence. Each block becomes a possible answer unit. That structure does not weaken the reader experience. It improves it. Developers, marketers, and busi

The AI Implementation Process I Use With Every Client Most AI projects do not fail at the model. They fail in the six weeks before anyone writes a prompt, and in the six weeks after the demo lands in a Slack channel and nobody knows who owns it. I have run enough of these now (from one-off automations to multi-agent content systems running unattended) that the process has converged into something stable. This is the version I actually use. It has five phases: scoping, POC, integration, evaluation, operations. Each phase has an exit criterion. If we cannot meet the exit criterion, we do not move forward. That single rule has saved more projects than any clever architecture choice. Phase 1: Scoping (1 to 2 weeks, fixed price) Scoping ends with a written document that names the workflow being automated, the system of record it touches, the success metric in hours or dollars, the data we have access to, and the smallest possible first slice. No model is chosen yet. No code is written. If we cannot produce that document, the engagement stops here and the client keeps the document. The hardest part of scoping is resisting the urge to solve the interesting problem. Clients almost always describe the AI-shaped fantasy ("an agent that handles all support tickets") when the real opportunity is narrower and uglier ("triage tier-1 tickets that mention billing, route to the right queue, draft a reply for human approval"). The narrower version ships. The fantasy does not. I run scoping as three sessions: Workflow walkthrough. Someone who actually does the work shows me their screen for an hour. I record it. I take timestamps. The point is to find the moments where a human is doing pattern matching that an LLM can do, and to find the moments where they are doing judgment that an LLM should not do. Data audit. Where does the input live? Where does the output need to go? What is the auth story? If the data is locked inside a SaaS product with no API and no export, that is the projec

You ask the AI for a bibliography. It hands you a title, authors, a journal, a year, a well-formed DOI. Everything is plausible, everything is clean. And one reference in two doesn't exist. Not "approximate": nonexistent. The DOI resolves to nothing, the paper was never written. The reflex is to ask the model again: "are you sure this source is real?" It says yes. Always. You just asked the forger about the authenticity of his forgery. Hallucination is plausible by construction An LLM doesn't store a database of publications. It generates likely sequences of words. A citation, to it, is a shape: a surname, an initial, two more names, a capitalized journal, a recent year, ten DOI digits. It produces that shape perfectly, because that's exactly what it's good at. The content doesn't need to be true to be plausible, it just needs to resemble. That's why a hallucinated reference is so vicious: it doesn't look like an error. A wrong calculation jumps out. An invented citation looks like a real one, until you click. Don't ask the culprit The golden rule fits in one sentence: never ask the model that hallucinated a citation whether that citation is real. For two reasons that compound. First, it doesn't have the information: it has no access to a registry, it can only regenerate something plausible. Second, even if it doubted, its self-evaluation bias pushes it to confirm what it already produced. You get a "yes" worth nothing. Verification has to come from elsewhere. From a source the model neither controls nor can invent: a metadata API. Three filters: existence, credibility, fidelity In my pipeline for writing technical dossiers, no reference enters the document before clearing three filters, in this order. Existence. The DOI must resolve. It's binary, and it's free. Crossref exposes its whole database: curl -s "https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1145/3290605.3300233" \ | jq '.message.title[0], .message.author[0].family, .message["published"]' If the API returns a title a

What This Guide Covers When you start building LLM-powered applications, one pattern becomes unavoidable: RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) . LLMs only know what they were trained on. Your company's internal documents, the latest spec sheets, project-specific information — none of that exists in the model. To handle data the model doesn't know, you need a system that retrieves relevant knowledge in real time and injects it into the context. That's RAG. In this guide, we'll implement a RAG system from scratch using pgvector and Gemini, then extend it step by step through Tool Use, AI Agents, MCP, and cloud deployment. Step 1: Embedding · Vector DB · RAG — core implementation Step 2: AI Architect perspective — design decisions explained Step 3: Tool Use — LLM autonomously searches the DB Step 4: AI Agents — combining multiple tools Step 5: MCP — exposing tools as a server Step 6: Cloud deployment — Render × Supabase Three Concepts to Understand First Embedding Computers can't measure "semantic similarity" from raw text. Embedding converts text into a list of numbers (a vector), and semantically similar words produce numerically similar patterns. "dog" → [ 0.82 , 0.75 , 0.10 , ... ] 768 numbers "cat" → [ 0.78 , 0.72 , 0.12 , ... ] ← similar pattern to "dog" "bank" → [ 0.08 , 0.10 , 0.85 , ... ] ← completely different Gemini's embedding model handles this conversion. Vector DB A regular DB searches by keyword matching. A vector DB searches by numeric distance — meaning it finds semantically related documents even when the exact words don't match. -- Regular search (misses if keywords don't match) SELECT * FROM docs WHERE body LIKE '%F1 score%' ; -- Vector search (finds semantically related docs) SELECT * FROM docs ORDER BY embedding <=> query_vector LIMIT 3 ; Search for "how to measure model performance" and it finds "F1 score calculation" — even without matching words. We use pgvector , a PostgreSQL extension, for this. RAG LLMs are limited to their training data. R

When confronted with cancer, Connor Christou fed everything tied tied to his regime — blood results, scan data, wearable output, journal entries — into Claude.

Mitigating Hallucinations in Theology AI: Implementing Groundedness Evaluation Pipelines For software developers and indie hackers, the era of building generic wrapper APIs is over. The real value now lies in highly specialized, niche vertical applications. One of the most fascinating, complex, and underserved niches is the intersection of artificial intelligence and religious doctrine. Building a catholic ai tool presents unique software engineering challenges. Unlike general-purpose chatbots, a theology ai application cannot afford to "hallucinate" or generate creative interpretations of established doctrines. In this space, an inaccurate answer is not just a software bug; it is a theological error. To build a high-quality, trustworthy catholic ai app , developers must move past basic prompt engineering. We must implement robust groundedness evaluation pipelines. This article explores the technical journey of building a specialized catholic ai chatbot , the catholic church stance on ai , our choice of tech stack, and how to build a production-grade groundedness pipeline to keep your AI aligned with official church teachings. The Catholic Church Stance on AI: Designing for Ethics and Trust Before writing a single line of Dart, Swift, or Python, we must understand the ethical landscape of ai and theology . The Vatican has taken an surprisingly proactive approach to artificial intelligence. Pope Francis has frequently spoken on the topic, advocating for "algor-ethics"—the ethical development of algorithms. The catholic church stance on ai emphasizes that technology must serve human dignity and remain aligned with truth. ┌─────────────────────────────────┐ │ The Vatican's Algor-ethics │ └────────────────┬────────────────┘ │ ┌─────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────┐ ▼ ▼ ┌──────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐ │ Human Agency │ │ Doctrinal Truth │ │ AI must assist, │ │ AI must not alter│ │ never replace │ │ established dogma│ └──────────────────┘ └─────────

Most discussions around MCP focus on tool calling. That is natural. When people first see MCP, the obvious use case is simple: Let the AI call external tools. A model can read a GitHub issue. A model can query a database. A model can update a file. A model can call an API. In that sense, MCP looks like an RPC layer for AI agents. That is useful. But I think it may not be the most important use of MCP. The more interesting use is this: MCP can distribute context, rules, skills, and operating contracts to AI clients. In other words, MCP is not only a way for AI to call tools during work. It can also be a way to define the working environment before the work starts. The problem with RAG RAG is usually used to answer this question: What information might be relevant to this request? The system searches documents, retrieves chunks, and gives them to the model. This works well for many cases. But it has structural limits. RAG retrieves likely relevant information. It does not necessarily define how the work should be done. For team-level AI work, this is a problem. A team does not only need information. A team also needs shared rules. For example: What is the authoritative source? What should be treated as unknown? When should the AI stop? When is human confirmation required? What is the closure condition? Which workflow should be used? Which domain skill applies? What evidence must be recorded? RAG can retrieve documents that describe these rules. But retrieval is not the same as governance. A retrieved chunk is just context. It is not necessarily an operating contract. The problem with local prompts Many teams try to solve this with prompts. They write instructions like: Follow our coding rules. Use this design document. Ask questions when unclear. Do not make risky changes. This helps, but it does not scale well. Each developer may have a different local prompt. Each AI client may load a different file. Each repository may contain a slightly different version of the ru

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MCP + RAG: Why I Stopped Building Complex RAG Systems After MCP Changed Everything Honestly, I've spent the last four years building increasingly complex RAG systems. Chunking strategies, embedding models, vector databases, rerankers, hybrid search... you name it, I've probably wasted a weekend trying it. I had this 1,800-hour knowledge base project called Papers — six years of notes, articles, bookmarks, everything. I built RAG version after RAG version, each time thinking "this time it'll be perfect." Spoiler: It never was. Then I added MCP (Model Context Protocol) support. And I realized something that completely changed how I think about knowledge retrieval: MCP makes traditional complex RAG obsolete for most use cases. Let me explain what I learned the hard way. The RAG Trap I Was Stuck In If you've built a RAG system, you know the drill: Chunking : Should you use fixed-size, semantic, recursive, or something fancy like LLM-powered chunking? Embeddings : OpenAI text-embedding-3-large vs Cohere vs nomic-ai vs your fine-tuned model? Vector Database : Pinecone vs Weaviate vs PGVector vs Qdrant vs Chroma? Retrieval : Top-k how many? Hybrid search with keywords? Reranking? Prompt Compression : How do you fit all the retrieved chunks into the context window? I went through every iteration. At one point, my RAG system was over 2,000 lines of code. I had configurable chunkers, multiple embedding providers, caching layers, hybrid search... it was impressive. It also didn't work that well. Here's what bothered me the most: I kept throwing more complexity at the problem, but the fundamental issue never went away. I was trying to make my knowledge base smart, but AI already got smart. Why was I reimplementing all this understanding logic when the AI can already do it better than me? How MCP Changed the Game When I added MCP support to Papers, I started with the simplest possible approach: Expose two tools: search_notes and get_note_content Search is just basic text matchin

SeaweedFS is an open-source, distributed object storage system with an S3-compatible API, a filer for POSIX-style hierarchical access, and a small footprint. This guide deploys SeaweedFS using Docker Compose with the master, volume, filer, S3, and admin services behind Traefik for automatic HTTPS on separate admin and S3 domains. By the end, you'll have SeaweedFS serving S3-compatible object storage securely at your domains. Prerequisite: Two DNS A records pointing at the server — storage.example.com (admin dashboard) and s3.storage.example.com (S3 API). AWS CLI installed on your local machine for testing. Set Up the Directory Structure 1. Create the project directory: $ mkdir seaweedfs && cd seaweedfs 2. Generate an access key and a secret key (run twice and save both): $ openssl rand -hex 16 3. Create the environment file: $ nano .env STORAGE_DOMAIN = storage.example.com LETSENCRYPT_EMAIL = your-email@example.com ADMIN_PASSWORD = yourpassword 4. Create the S3 identities file: $ nano s3-config.json { "identities" : [ { "name" : "admin" , "credentials" : [ { "accessKey" : "YOUR_ACCESS_KEY" , "secretKey" : "YOUR_SECRET_KEY" } ], "actions" : [ "Admin" , "Read" , "Write" , "List" , "Tagging" ] } ] } Deploy with Docker Compose 1. Create the Compose manifest: $ nano docker-compose.yml services : traefik : image : traefik:v3.7.0 container_name : traefik restart : unless-stopped ports : - " 80:80" - " 443:443" volumes : - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro - ./letsencrypt:/letsencrypt command : - --providers.docker=true - --providers.docker.exposedByDefault=false - --entrypoints.web.address=:80 - --entrypoints.websecure.address=:443 - --entrypoints.web.http.redirections.entrypoint.to=websecure - --entrypoints.web.http.redirections.entrypoint.scheme=https - --entrypoints.web.http.redirections.entrypoint.permanent=true - --certificatesresolvers.letsencrypt.acme.email=${LETSENCRYPT_EMAIL} - --certificatesresolvers.letsencrypt.acme.storage=/letsencrypt/acme.json - --

Web MCP, DevTools per agenti e Modern Web Guidance: meno hype, più strumenti e metodo. Negli annunci recenti di Chrome è emersa una cosa interessante: al netto delle novità “appariscenti”, ciò che resta più utile per il lavoro quotidiano è quello che migliora workflow, diagnosi e decisioni tecniche . Tre filoni, in particolare, disegnano una direzione chiara: Web MCP , DevTools per agenti e Modern Web Guidance . Di seguito una sintesi ragionata di cosa significano, perché contano per il frontend, e come prepararsi a sfruttarli. 1) Web MCP: il ponte tra agenti e Web (senza incollaggi fragili) Se stai lavorando con assistenti/agentic workflow, oggi il collo di bottiglia è quasi sempre lo stesso: far sì che un agente capisca e usi le capacità del browser e delle app web in modo affidabile. Web MCP punta a risolvere questo punto creando un linguaggio/protocollo comune per esporre “capacità” (capabilities) e strumenti (tools) che un agente può invocare in modo strutturato, invece di basarsi su prompt lunghi, scraping o integrazioni ad hoc. Perché è importante per chi fa frontend Automazioni più robuste : meno script fragili che si rompono al primo refactor del DOM. Integrazioni più standard : se più strumenti parlano lo stesso “dialetto”, il costo di collegare agenti e applicazioni scende. Esperienze utente nuove : assistenti che completano task complessi dentro l’app (es. compilazioni, ricerca guidata, operazioni amministrative) con maggiore affidabilità. Implicazione pratica Inizia a ragionare sull’app come su un insieme di azioni esplicite (es. “crea ordine”, “esporta report”, “filtra dataset”), non solo come UI. Questa mentalità ti rende pronto a esporre capacità in modo sicuro e controllato, quando lo stack lo renderà semplice. 2) DevTools per agenti: debugging e performance nell’era dell’automazione Se Web MCP è il “ponte”, DevTools per agenti è la cassetta degli attrezzi per controllare quel ponte: osservabilità, diagnosi e iterazione rapida su flussi in cui non è

A few months ago I was demoing my RAG-powered support bot to a colleague, feeling pretty confident about it. Then it confidently told her our refund policy was “30 days, no questions asked.” Our actual policy is 14 days, with conditions. The bot didn’t hedge. It didn’t say “I’m not sure.” It just made it up and said it with the same calm tone it uses for everything else. That demo stung. RAG was supposed to fix hallucinations, not just relocate them. Here’s what I learned debugging it, roughly in the order I learned it. 1. My chunks were too big, and too dumb I was splitting documents by character count, 1000 chars with slight overlap. It felt efficient. It wasn’t. A single chunk often contained unrelated sections. For example, the end of a “Shipping Policy” and the start of a “Returns Policy” could sit together in the same block. So when the retriever saw a query about returns, it would grab that chunk and the model would blend both sections into one confident but wrong answer. Fix: I switched to semantic chunking based on headings and paragraphs instead of raw character limits. More work upfront, but it stopped feeding the model Frankenstein context. 2. I trusted top-k similarity way too much My retriever was pulling the top 3 chunks by cosine similarity and passing them straight into the prompt. The problem: “similar” is not the same as “relevant.” A chunk can be semantically close to the query but still not actually contain the answer. The model doesn’t know that, it just assumes everything in context is true. Fix: I added a reranking step using a cross-encoder and started logging retrieval scores properly. That alone made it obvious when the system had no real answer but was still trying to act confident. 3. I never told the model it was allowed to say “I don’t know” My prompt was basically: “Use the context to answer the question.” That’s it. No instruction on what to do when the context is insufficient. So the model did what LLMs do when under-specified: it f

Why a simple string match beat Apple's NLEmbedding for local RAG how apple's nlembedding drove me crazy and how i built my own hybrid search engine recently, while working on my personal ai agent (pheronagent), i was focused on perfecting its memory and retrieval system. everyone is talking about that famous acronym: rag (retrieval-augmented generation). the system is simple: i feed the agent my documents, it converts them into vectors (embeddings), and when i ask a question, it finds the most similar vectors and answers me. sounds perfect on paper, right? so, like any loyal apple ecosystem developer, instead of downloading massive models from external sources (or burning money on apis), i decided to use nlembedding—the native capability of the operating system that runs directly on-device. after all, apple had embedded this into the os; it was both fast and privacy-focused. but real life, as it turns out, doesn't progress as smoothly as wwdc presentations... where have i worked? - the first explosion it all started with a very innocent question. i had uploaded my cv to the system. while chatting with my agent, i casually asked: "where have i worked?" i expected the agent to fire up the metal cores in the background within seconds, find my cv, and list the companies for me. instead, the agent stared blankly. i opened the logs to see what the hell the search engine was doing behind the scenes. the shocking scenario was exactly this: cosine similarity between the query and my actual cv text: 0.587 the threshold i set for relevance: 0.60 it missed it by a hair! "no worries," i thought. "we can just lower the threshold a bit, make it 0.55, and call it a day." but then i saw the truly terrifying thing just one line below. for the exact same query, guess what score a completely irrelevant, junk record in the system—a list of files containing .ds_store—got? 0.59 - 0.60! wait a minute... my detailed, multi-page resume gets a score of 0.587 just because it doesn't contain th

Introduction Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have transformed how we interact with AI. They can write code, answer questions, summarize documents, and generate creative content. However, they have one major limitation - they only know what they were trained on and can sometimes generate incorrect or outdated information. So, how do modern AI applications answer questions about your company's private documents, recent news, or knowledge that wasn't part of the model's training? The answer is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). In this blog, we'll explore what RAG is, how it works, its architecture, benefits, challenges, and real-world applications. What is RAG? Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an AI architecture that combines a retrieval system with a Large Language Model (LLM). Instead of relying only on the model's internal knowledge, RAG first retrieves relevant information from an external knowledge source and then uses that information to generate a more accurate response. Think of it like an open-book exam. Instead of answering from memory, the AI first searches for the most relevant pages and then writes the answer based on those pages. Why Do We Need RAG? Traditional LLMs have several limitations: Knowledge becomes outdated. They cannot access private company data. They may hallucinate (generate incorrect facts). Retraining models is expensive and time-consuming. RAG solves these problems by allowing the model to retrieve fresh and domain-specific information before generating an answer. RAG Architecture A typical RAG pipeline consists of the following components: User Query Embedding Model Vector Database Retriever Prompt Builder Large Language Model Final Response Step-by-Step Workflow * Step 1: * User asks a question Example: "What is our company's leave policy?" Step 2: Convert the question into embeddings The query is transformed into a vector representation using an embedding model. Example: "What is leave policy?" ↓ [0.12, -0.45, 0.7

How to Build Systems That Actually Know Your Data (Not Hallucinate About It) Introduction: The Story Begins 👦 Nephew: Uncle, I keep hearing "RAG this, RAG that" in tech interviews. When I ask what it means, people throw around words like "Retrieval-Augmented Generation" and I just nod like I understand. But honestly? I'm lost. 👨‍🦳 Uncle: (laughing) That's the best honest question I've heard all week. Let me ask you something first. If I gave you a question right now - "What year did India win the World Cup?" - how would you answer? 👦 Nephew: Well... I'd pull up Google, search for it, read the answer, then tell you. 👨‍🦳 Uncle: Exactly. You don't answer from memory alone. You go fetch the information first, then answer based on what you found . That's RAG in real life. And that simple idea - fetch first, answer after - fixes almost every problem we face with AI today. 👦 Nephew: But uncle, AI can remember things from its training. Why does it need to fetch? 👨‍🦳 Uncle: Ah! That's where we land in trouble. Come, sit... SECTION 1: RAG FUNDAMENTALS - The Core Concept The Problem We're Actually Solving 👨‍🦳 Uncle: Imagine you're hiring for a tech company. You receive 500 resumes for a Senior React Developer role. Now tell me - how would you actually process them? 👦 Nephew: I'd... probably make a spreadsheet? List all the candidates with key skills? 👨‍🦳 Uncle: Right. But here's the catch - you can't read all 500 resumes deeply. So what do you really do? 👦 Nephew: Skim for keywords like "React", "JavaScript", "5 years"? 👨‍🦳 Uncle: Exactly. You skim and hope you don't miss anyone good. Now, here's the problem: what if a candidate wrote "React.js" instead of "React"? Your eyes might still catch it. But a dumb computer doing exact string matching? It says "no match". What if someone wrote "Built real-time user interfaces with the React framework"? The candidate clearly knows React, but the word "React" appears nowhere in that sentence. The computer misses them. This is exactly wh

AI Agent Orchestration: Proxmox Automation, OpenAI Data Agents & Azure Serverless Runtime Today's Highlights Today's highlights focus on practical AI agent applications and robust deployment strategies. We delve into building a secure AI admin for Proxmox, explore OpenAI's internal data analyst agent, and examine Azure Functions' new serverless runtime for agents. I didn't trust an AI with my Proxmox cluster — so I built one that can't surprise me (Dev.to Top) Source: https://dev.to/john-broadway/i-didnt-trust-an-ai-with-my-proxmox-cluster-so-i-built-one-that-cant-surprise-me-2k9l This article details a practical, hands-on approach to building a reliable AI agent for managing a Proxmox virtual environment. The author sought an agent capable of performing critical tasks like creating VMs, fixing storage issues, and tailing container logs, but with an emphasis on predictable and safe operations. The core idea is to create an AI that operates within defined boundaries, ensuring it doesn't perform unexpected or destructive actions. This tackles a crucial challenge in AI agent development: achieving trust and control in automated workflows. The implementation likely involves careful prompt engineering, tool use, and possibly a custom execution environment or validation layers to ensure commands are executed as intended and within pre-approved parameters. This project exemplifies how developers can apply AI agent orchestration principles to real-world IT automation, moving beyond simple information retrieval to true task execution, while maintaining human oversight and preventing 'surprises' common with less constrained AI systems. It's a blueprint for anyone looking to build robust, trustworthy AI-powered RPA solutions for system administration. Comment: A brilliant take on building AI agents for critical infrastructure. The focus on 'can't surprise me' highlights the need for robust control and guardrails, crucial for production workflow automation. This is what practic

Imagine a user trying to upload a 100MB video or a high-resolution photo to your app. If you use the standard Rails file upload, that file travels from the user's browser to your Rails server, and then your server sends it to S3 or Google Cloud. This is a terrible way to do it. While that 100MB file is transferring, your Rails worker (Puma) is frozen. It can't handle other users. If three people upload large files at once, your whole app will stop responding. In 2026, the professional way to handle this is Direct Uploads . With Direct Uploads, the file goes directly from the user's browser to your cloud storage (S3, R2, etc.). Your Rails server only handles a tiny bit of metadata. It is faster for the user and much safer for your server. Here is how to set it up in Rails 8. STEP 1: Configure Your Storage First, make sure you aren't using the local disk for production. You need a cloud provider like AWS S3 or Cloudflare R2. In your config/storage.yml : amazon : service : S3 access_key_id : <%= ENV['AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID'] %> secret_access_key : <%= ENV['AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY'] %> region : us-east-1 bucket : my-app-uploads # Crucial for Direct Uploads! public : true Note: You must configure CORS in your S3/R2 dashboard to allow requests from your domain. If you don't do this, the browser will block the upload. STEP 2: The Rails Form Rails makes the backend part incredibly easy. You just add one attribute to your file field: direct_upload: true . <!-- app/views/users/_form.html.erb --> <%= form_with ( model: user ) do | f | %> <div class= "field" > <%= f . label :avatar %> <%= f . file_field :avatar , direct_upload: true %> </div> <%= f . submit "Save Profile" %> <% end %> When you add direct_upload: true , Rails automatically includes a JavaScript library that handles the "handshake" with S3. STEP 3: Adding a Progress Bar (The UX Win) Direct uploads can take a few seconds. If nothing happens on the screen, the user will think your app is broken. We can use the built-in Ac

Your retriever returned the right documents. The similarity scores look fine. The answer is still wrong. If you've shipped RAG, you've seen this — and it's the failure that survives every retrieval upgrade. What everyone tries Reranker. Higher top-k. Hybrid search. A better embedding model. All of these chase the same goal: documents more similar to the query. They help when the right document wasn't being retrieved. They do nothing when the right document was retrieved and the answer is still wrong. Why it doesn't work Similarity answers "is this chunk about the same topic?" It does not answer "does this chunk contain the facts needed to support the answer?" Those come apart constantly. A chunk can be highly similar — same vocabulary, same subject — and contain nothing that actually grounds the answer. Hand the model a pile of on-topic text and it will produce a fluent, plausible, even cited-looking answer. The grounding is cosmetic: the text was nearby, not load-bearing. High similarity with a wrong answer isn't a contradiction. You asked retrieval to find related text. It did. Nobody asked whether the text was enough. The one shift Stop treating retrieval output as evidence. Treat it as candidate material that has to pass an explicit evidence check before it can support an answer. Put a step between retrieval and generation: does the retrieved set actually contain the facts this answer requires? If not, abstain. When the documents don't contain the facts, the system should return nothing rather than a confident guess. Relevant context in, only sufficient evidence allowed through. That's the line between a RAG demo and a RAG system you can trust in production. I write about the three boundaries where production RAG dies — query, evidence, output — from the angle of shipping under security and model constraints. Read the full version on my blog , where this connects to the practical RAG Failure Diagnosis Kit for teams debugging production RAG.

The suggestion every RAG app ignores If you've shipped a retrieval-augmented assistant, you've written some version of this line in your system prompt: "If the answer isn't in the provided context, say you don't know. Do not make things up." And you've watched the model cheerfully ignore it under pressure. A confident-sounding question comes in, retrieval returns something adjacent , and the model stitches together an answer that's plausible, fluent, and wrong. Telling a language model not to hallucinate is a suggestion — and suggestions lose to the model's overwhelming prior toward being helpful. I got tired of fighting this with prompt wording, so I tried a different framing while building MCP SDK Docs Assistant , an assistant for the Model Context Protocol TypeScript SDK. The framing: don't ask the model to refuse — remove its ability to fabricate. Refusal as code, not as a prompt The core idea is that the model can only hallucinate if you hand it material to hallucinate from. So the refusal decision lives in the retrieval tool, before the model ever sees anything. If nothing clears a confidence bar, the tool returns an empty result set, and the model is left with no source text to spin into an answer. In practice, the tool looks roughly like this: const candidates = await hybridSearch ( query , { version , limit : 12 }); if ( ! hasConfidentMatch ( candidates )) { // best cosine sim < 0.45 return { relevant : false , results : [] }; // model has nothing to work with } const results = await rerank ( query , candidates , 6 ); return { relevant : true , results }; The model isn't asked to behave. The system is shaped so that the only coherent next move, when results come back empty, is to say "the docs don't cover this." Refusal stops being a personality trait you're hoping for and becomes a property of the architecture. Why this particular SDK needed it There's a second failure mode this assistant had to solve, and it's specific to fast-moving libraries. The MCP Ty

LLM Fallback in Production, Agentic eCommerce, and GitHub Copilot for Parallel Agents Today's Highlights This week highlights practical applications and architectural considerations for AI frameworks, focusing on robust LLM deployments and agent orchestration. We cover building resilient multi-provider LLM systems, leveraging agents for dynamic e-commerce, and GitHub's new desktop app for managing parallel AI agent workflows. How I built a 3-provider LLM fallback system in production (and what actually broke) (Dev.to Top) Source: https://dev.to/ayush_notsogreat_b673d5/how-i-built-a-3-provider-llm-fallback-system-in-production-and-what-actually-broke-46jk This article details the implementation of a robust LLM fallback system designed for production environments, addressing the common challenge of provider reliability and API rate limits. The author shares practical insights gained from building Socra, an application reliant on multiple LLM providers. The core of the system involves orchestrating requests across three different LLM APIs, ensuring that if one fails or encounters issues, the system seamlessly switches to an alternative without disrupting the user experience. The piece delves into the specific architectural decisions made to achieve this, including strategies for managing API keys, handling varying response formats, and implementing intelligent retry mechanisms. It also transparently discusses unexpected failures and critical lessons learned during the system's deployment, offering invaluable advice on anticipating real-world production issues beyond theoretical design. This practical guide provides a blueprint for developers seeking to build more resilient and fault-tolerant LLM-powered applications, crucial for maintaining high availability and consistent performance in AI workflows. Comment: Implementing multi-provider LLM fallbacks is essential for production-grade reliability; this article provides practical architecture and lessons from real-world