Picture this: You’re asking an AI about cancer treatments. It sounds super confident and gives you detailed answers. But here’s the problem — it just made up a medical study that doesn’t exist.
RAG is a design pattern, not a product. LangChain supports it out of the box. This guide shows a production-ready RAG setup in LangChain with architecture, retrieval choices, runnable code, evaluation metrics, and trade-offs from my client projects.
Bi-encoder retrieval is fast but imprecise. Cross-encoder reranking improves top-k precision at the cost of some latency. Here’s when and how to add it.