13 articles1 series

Featured series / 8 parts

RAG, without the magic

A non-technical path from deciding whether retrieval belongs in the system to measuring which half failed.

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13
  1. Article8 MIN read

    the flat model could not hold a journal entry

    i started monday trying to add a content type. by lunch i was rewriting the schema. an architecture pressure-test, in six phases, with one live smoke test that caught what static review didn't.

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  2. RAG without the magic / 0110 MIN read

    Should this be RAG?

    A simple way to decide whether an application needs access to changing knowledge, more consistent model behavior, or both — without pretending retrieval or fine-tuning is magic.

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  3. RAG without the magic / 0215 MIN read

    What happens before the answer?

    One common RAG path, explained without the product catalogue: how sources become searchable, how a question retrieves authorized evidence, and where either half can fail.

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  4. RAG without the magic / 0315 MIN read

    The boundary becomes part of the answer

    Chunking is not housekeeping. Where one passage ends changes what retrieval can find, what context survives, and which answer the system can support.

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  5. RAG without the magic / 049 MIN read

    How does a search find the same idea in different words?

    Embeddings can recover related phrasing, but related is not the same as relevant. A corrected mental model for representations, comparison functions, indexes, and compatibility.

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  6. RAG without the magic / 0510 MIN read

    Similar is not relevant

    Related passages are only candidates. A failure-led guide to eligibility, complementary retrieval, rank fusion, reranking, and returning enough context.

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  7. RAG without the magic / 0611 MIN read

    The retriever got the wrong question

    Clarify, rewrite, split, or chain before retrieval. A practical guide to query transformation that preserves intent, authorization, provenance, and stopping rules.

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  8. RAG without the magic / 0712 MIN read

    The pipeline is part of the answer

    Start with the fixed path. Add correction, durable routing, bounded tools, or graph retrieval only when a measured failure earns the additional mechanism.

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  9. RAG without the magic / 0817 MIN read

    The answer failed. Which half broke?

    Evaluate retrieval and generation separately, keep every failure replayable, and carry the result through experiments, monitoring, canaries, rollback, and incident review.

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  10. Article5 MIN read

    Work-state, not transcript

    A cross-harness portability contract built from explicit work state: brief, phase, claim, instance, supersession, working tree, and decision log.

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  11. Article7 MIN read

    Rules the agent runs into, not reads

    What changed when IGRIS guardrails moved from prompt prose into write, phase, role, and commit boundaries, including where those boundaries still soften.

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  12. Article6 MIN read

    Grow the OS by declaring, not editing

    IGRIS has declared doors for surfaces, modules, document types, cognition, and harnesses, with a different proof for each extension path.

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  13. Article7 MIN read

    Seven instances that propose. You approve.

    A field note on separating autonomous inference from reviewed memory, and on the configuration paths that keep that boundary honest.

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