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Roadmap

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)

From your first chat-with-your-PDF demo to a retrieval system you can measure and trust.

4 to 6 weeks Intermediate 5 steps, all free

Who it's for

Developers building assistants, search or support bots on top of their own documents.

Where it leads

  • AI engineer
  • Search engineer
  • LLM engineer

By the end you can

  • Choose an embedding model and vector store with reasons
  • Build an end-to-end RAG pipeline
  • Improve retrieval with chunking, hybrid search and reranking
  • Measure retrieval and answer quality separately
  1. 1

    The idea, from the source

    Why retrieval beats stuffing a model with facts, and what the original architecture did.

  2. 2

    Embeddings and vector search

    Pick an embedding model, store vectors, and understand similarity and indexes.

  3. 3

    Build your first pipeline

    Load, chunk, embed, retrieve and generate, end to end, in an afternoon.

    Do this: Build a bot that answers questions about one real document set you own, with citations.

  4. 4

    Make retrieval good

    Chunking, hybrid search, reranking and query rewriting are where quality is won.

  5. 5

    Measure it

    Separate retrieval quality from answer quality, and test every change against a fixed set.

    Do this: Measure recall@5 on 30 real questions, then improve it with one change at a time.

Learning this with others is easier.

Ask questions when you're stuck, find people on the same path, and track your progress on DevLearn.