AI article
RAG is a search problem wearing a costume
Community description: The internal docs assistant answered confidently and was wrong a third of the time. Everyone blamed the model, but the model was fine. Retrieval was returning the right document eleventh out of ten. Fixing it took six weeks of ordinary search engineering, and none of it touched a prompt.
Dev.to | Oct 6, 2026 | Ahmet Zeybek
Automated excerpt
The metric was recall at 5, because the assistant put five documents in front of the model. Two thirds of the time the correct document was in the five. Query rewriting puts a model in front of the search.
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