Build Your First RAG Chatbot — Step by Step Guide

A practical step-by-step guide to building your own RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) chatbot from scratch. Written by an AI engineer who has built RAG systems in production.

What's inside:

What RAG is and why it beats plain LLMs

Setting up Python environment and dependencies

Loading and chunking documents

Creating embeddings with sentence-transformers

Building a FAISS vector store

Connecting to Groq/OpenAI LLM API

Building a FastAPI backend to serve it

Testing and debugging common issues

Code snippets included throughout

Who is this for:

CS students wanting to build AI projects

Developers exploring LLMs for the first time

Anyone who wants to build a portfolio-worthy AI project