A comprehensive course teaching data-driven approaches to building and improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. This repository contains course materials, code examples, and a companion book.
All of this material is supported by the Systematically Improving RAG Course.
This course teaches you how to systematically improve RAG applications through:
- Data-driven evaluation and metrics
- Embedding fine-tuning and optimization
- Query understanding and routing
- Structured data integration
- Production deployment strategies
The core philosophy centers around the "RAG Flywheel" - a continuous improvement cycle that emphasizes:
- Measure: Establish benchmarks and evaluation metrics
- Analyze: Understand failure modes and user patterns
- Improve: Apply targeted optimizations
- Iterate: Continuous refinement based on real-world usage
.
├── cohort_1/ # First cohort materials (6 weeks)
├── cohort_2/ # Second cohort materials (weeks 0-6)
├── latest/ # Current course version with latest updates
│ ├── week0/ # Getting started with Jupyter, LanceDB, and evals
│ ├── week1/ # RAG evaluation foundations
│ ├── week2/ # Embedding fine-tuning
│ ├── week4/ # Query understanding and routing
│ ├── week5/ # Structured data and metadata
│ ├── week6/ # Tool selection and product integration
│ ├── case_study/ # Comprehensive WildChat project
│ └── extra_kura/ # Advanced notebooks on clustering and classifiers
├── docs/ # MkDocs documentation source
│ ├── workshops/ # Detailed chapter guides (0-7) aligned with course weeks
│ ├── talks/ # Industry expert presentations and case studies
│ ├── office-hours/# Q&A summaries from cohorts 2 and 3
│ ├── assets/ # Images and diagrams for documentation
│ └── misc/ # Additional learning resources
├── data/ # CSV files from industry talks
├── md/ # Markdown conversions of notebooks
└── mkdocs.yml # Documentation configuration
The course follows a 6-week structure where each week corresponds to specific workshop chapters in the companion book:
- Book Coverage: Chapter 0 (Introduction) + Chapter 1 (Starting the Flywheel with Data)
- Topics:
- Shifting from static implementations to continuously improving products
- Overcoming the cold-start problem through synthetic data generation
- Establishing meaningful metrics aligned with business goals
- RAG as a recommendation engine wrapped around language models
- Book Coverage: Chapter 2 (From Evaluation to Product Enhancement)
- Topics:
- Transforming evaluation insights into concrete improvements
- Fine-tuning embeddings with Cohere and open-source models
- Re-ranking strategies and targeted capability development
- Book Coverage: Chapter 3 (UX - 3 parts)
- Part 1: Design Principles
- Part 2: Feedback Collection
- Part 3: Iterative Improvement
- Topics:
- Building interfaces that delight users and gather feedback
- Creating virtuous cycles of improvement
- Continuous refinement based on user interaction
- Book Coverage: Chapter 4 (Topic Modeling - 2 parts)
- Part 1: Analysis - Segmenting users and queries
- Part 2: Prioritization - High-value opportunities
- Topics:
- Query classification with BERTopic
- Pattern discovery in user queries
- Creating improvement roadmaps based on usage patterns
- Book Coverage: Chapter 5 (Multimodal - 2 parts)
- Part 1: Understanding different content types
- Part 2: Implementation strategies
- Topics:
- Working with documents, images, tables, and structured data
- Metadata filtering and Text-to-SQL integration
- PDF parsing and multimodal embeddings
- Book Coverage: Chapter 6 (Architecture - 3 parts)
- Part 1: Intelligent routing to specialized components
- Part 2: Building and integrating specialized tools
- Part 3: Creating unified product experiences
- Topics:
- Tool evaluation and selection
- Performance optimization strategies
- Streaming implementations and production deployment
A comprehensive project using the WildChat dataset that covers:
- Data exploration and understanding
- Vector database integration (ChromaDB, LanceDB, Turbopuffer)
- Synthetic question generation
- Summarization strategies
- Complete test suite implementation
- LLM APIs: OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere
- Vector Databases: LanceDB, ChromaDB, Turbopuffer
- ML/AI Frameworks: Sentence-transformers, BERTopic, Transformers
- Evaluation Tools: Braintrust, Pydantic-evals
- Monitoring: Logfire, production monitoring strategies
- Data Processing: Pandas, NumPy, BeautifulSoup, SQLModel
- Visualization: Matplotlib, Seaborn, Streamlit
- CLI Framework: Typer + Rich for interactive command-line tools
- Document Processing: Docling for PDF parsing and analysis
The /docs directory contains a comprehensive book built with MkDocs that serves as the primary learning resource:
- Introduction & Core Concepts: The RAG Flywheel philosophy and product-first thinking
- Workshop Chapters (0-6): Detailed guides that map directly to each course week
- Office Hours: Q&A summaries from Cohorts 2 and 3 with real-world implementation insights
- Industry Talks: Expert presentations including:
- RAG Anti-patterns in the Wild
- Semantic Search Over the Web
- Understanding Embedding Performance
- Online Evals and Production Monitoring
- RAG Without APIs (Browser-based approaches)
- Product-First Thinking: Treating RAG as an evolving product, not a static implementation
- Data-Driven Improvement: Using metrics, evaluations, and user feedback to guide development
- Systematic Approach: Moving from ad-hoc tweaking to structured improvement processes
- User-Centered Design: Focusing on user value and experience, not just technical capabilities
- Continuous Learning: Building systems that improve with every interaction
To build and view the documentation:
# Serve documentation locally (live reload)
mkdocs serve
# Build static documentation
mkdocs buildlatest/ directory for the most current course content.
The cohort_1/ and cohort_2/ directories contain materials from previous course iterations and are kept for reference only. All new development and course work should be done in latest/.
- Python 3.11 (required - the project uses specific features from this version)
uvpackage manager (recommended) orpip
-
Clone the repository
-
Navigate to the
latest/directory:cd latest/ -
Install dependencies:
# Using uv (recommended) uv install # Or using pip pip install -e .
-
Start with
week0/for the most up-to-date content -
Follow the notebooks in sequential order within each week
-
Reference the corresponding book chapters in
/docsfor deeper understanding
Before committing changes, run:
# Format and fix code issues
uv run ruff check --fix --unsafe-fixes .
uv run ruff format .This course emphasizes:
- Systematic Improvement: Data-driven approaches over guesswork
- Product Thinking: Building RAG systems that solve real problems
- Practical Application: Real-world datasets and examples
- Evaluation-First: Measure before and after every change
- Continuous Learning: The field evolves rapidly; the flywheel helps you adapt
- Industry talk transcripts in
/data/ - Office hours recordings summaries in
/docs/office_hours/ - Advanced notebooks in
/latest/extra_kura/for clustering and classification topics - Complete case study implementation in
/latest/case_study/
This is educational material for the "Systematically Improving RAG Applications" course.
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