38 posts tagged with "retrieval"

Most agent demos work with five tools. Production systems have fifty. The gap between those two numbers is where most agent architectures fall apart.

When you give an LLM four tools and a clear task, it usually picks the right one. When you give it fifty tools, something more interesting happens: accuracy collapses, token costs balloon, and the failure mode often looks like the model hallucinating a tool call rather than admitting it doesn't know which tool to use. Research from the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard found accuracy dropping from 43% to just 2% on calendar scheduling tasks when the number of tools expanded from 4 to 51 across multiple domains. That is not a graceful degradation curve.

Ninety percent of agentic RAG projects failed in production in 2024. Not because the technology was broken, but because engineers wired up vector search, a prompt, and an LLM, called it a retrieval pipeline, and shipped — without accounting for the compounding failure costs at every layer between query and answer.

Classic RAG is a deterministic function: embed query → vector search → stuff context → generate. It runs once, in one direction, with no feedback loop. That works when queries are clean single-hop lookups against a well-chunked corpus. It fails spectacularly when a user asks "compare the liability clauses across these five contracts," or "summarize what's changed in our infra config since the Q3 incident," or any question that requires synthesizing evidence across documents before forming an answer.