Lesson 1: Baseline RAG and the patterns that check themselves
37 min read·13 Oct 2026
Module 10 · Lesson 1 · About 75 minutes · Needs: Module 8 (reranker, bar, context), Module 9 Lesson 1 (answer contract) and Module 7 Lesson 1 (condensing, glossary)
The situation
On Friday 9 October 2026 Ellie Shaw types: "I did that last month too. Is it covered?" Hollin's pipeline searches once, finds nothing above Module 8's bar, and hands her over. The answer, a 5-year motor cover, is in the corpus.
Grace asks whether the pipeline could notice a bad search and try again. Kwame asks which published patterns are worth building. This lesson measures the plain pipeline's limits and adds a corrective loop, hollin/patterns/crag.py. The Hollin data is simulated.