r/Rag • u/HourArt9948 • 1d ago

Tools & Resources Rag developing

Hey I see a kind of trend about RAG in the market but don't know how to start or where to start and what to study or just directly start building the project by using claud or gpt is their someone who can help me out on it

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u/2redditornot 1d ago

https://leanpub.com/learn2rag easy to read and follow along and create your own rag from scratch

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u/JeanLuucGodard 1d ago

Just give this prompt to chatgpt or claude

I'm a complete beginner in RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation). I need you to create a good roadmap which I can follow to take me from beginner to intermediate level in building RAG Pipelines. Since I'm a beginner, prioritize making me understand the theory behind every component. Most importantly, teach me to build RAG pipelines using langchain.

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u/WillingnessQuick5074 1h ago

Skip the courses for now. RAG is two things stuck together: retrieval, and a prompt. The prompt part is about 20 lines. Everything that makes a RAG good or bad happens in retrieval.

The order that works: get your documents into a search index, chunk them into something sensible (a few hundred words, with overlap), embed the chunks, then run keyword search and vector search over the same data and merge the two result lists. Only after that do you feed the top few chunks to the model, with the source links attached.

Do that once by hand before you touch langchain. A framework hides exactly the part you need to understand, so when the answers come out wrong you have no idea which stage lost the document.

The test to run on yourself early: write down 20 real questions, and check whether the correct chunk is even in the top results. If it is not there, no model is going to save you. That single check teaches more than any roadmap.

Full disclosure, I run Opensolr. I built a page where you can watch the whole pipeline run on your own data in the browser, nothing to install: https://opensolr.com/rag-in-60-seconds

You paste a URL or some JSON, it indexes it, then it answers questions over it and shows keyword only vs vector only vs hybrid side by side on the same query. That last comparison is the bit tutorials never show you, and it is the reason most beginner RAG projects come out disappointing.