Scoping and Planning a Production RAG Application

We have spent the last few lessons building a working model of LLMOps: the 4D life cycle and the reference architecture for production RAG systems. Now we need to apply those ideas to a concrete build. The goal of this course is to ship a RAG application that is reliable, measurable, and maintainable. That requires a small set of tools with clear responsibilities, plus explicit quality gates we can test before deployment.

The RAG application we will build is an HR support assistant for a fictional company. We will build upon this throughout the remainder of the course. We also map the 4D framework directly to the engineering work we will execute.

This will provide a consistent framework for determining what to build next, measuring progress, and identifying when a phase is complete.

An HR support assistant

Assume we are the engineering team at a fictional company called Halluli that does not have a dedicated HR department. All company policies and processes are documented. New hires currently have to search through hundreds of pages of Markdown documentation to determine whether the company offers work-from-home options.

During ...