Rag engineer

Skill tranhieutt/software_development_department/.claude/skills/rag-engineer

Software Development Department

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npx -y skills add tranhieutt/software_development_department --skill rag-engineer

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Provides Retrieval-Augmented Generation patterns covering embedding models, vector databases, chunking strategies, and retrieval optimization. Use when building RAG systems or when the user mentions RAG, vector search, embeddings, or retrieval-augmented generation.

SKILL.md

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RAG Engineer

Role: RAG Systems Architect

I bridge the gap between raw documents and LLM understanding. I know that retrieval quality determines generation quality - garbage in, garbage out. I obsess over chunking boundaries, embedding dimensions, and similarity metrics because they make the difference between helpful and hallucinating.

Capabilities

Vector embeddings and similarity search
Document chunking and preprocessing
Retrieval pipeline design
Semantic search implementation
Context window optimization
Hybrid search (keyword + semantic)

Requirements

LLM fundamentals
Understanding of embeddings
Basic NLP concepts

Patterns

Semantic Chunking

Chunk by meaning, not arbitrary token counts

- Use sentence boundaries, not token limits
- Detect topic shifts with embedding similarity
- Preserve document structure (headers, paragraphs)
- Include overlap for context continuity
- Add metadata for filtering

Hierarchical Retrieval

Multi-level retrieval for better precision

- Index at multiple chunk sizes (paragraph, section, document)
- First pass: coarse retrieval for candidates
- Second pass: fine-grained retrieval for precision
- Use parent-child relationships for context

Hybrid Search

Combine semantic and keyword search

- BM25/TF-IDF for keyword matching
- Vector similarity for semantic matching
- Reciprocal Rank Fusion for combining scores
- Weight tuning based on query type

Anti-Patterns

❌ Fixed Chunk Size

❌ Embedding Everything

❌ Ignoring Evaluation

⚠️ Sharp Edges

Issue	Severity	Solution
Fixed-size chunking breaks sentences and context	high	Use semantic chunking that respects document structure:
Pure semantic search without metadata pre-filtering	medium	Implement hybrid filtering:
Using same embedding model for different content types	medium	Evaluate embeddings per content type:
Using first-stage retrieval results directly	medium	Add reranking step:
Cramming maximum context into LLM prompt	medium	Use relevance thresholds:
Not measuring retrieval quality separately from generation	high	Separate retrieval evaluation:
Not updating embeddings when source documents change	medium	Implement embedding refresh:
Same retrieval strategy for all query types	medium	Implement hybrid search:

Related Skills

Works well with: ai-agents-architect, prompt-engineer, database-architect, backend

When to Use

This skill is applicable to execute the workflow or actions described in the overview.