RAG Design: 12 Links + Arch Notes

Who this is for

1. Engineers & AI learners building their first or second RAG system
2. Product / Solution Architects transitioning into AI system design
3. Anyone tired of scattered blogs and wants clarity + direction

This resource gives you curated links + architectural thinking, so you can design, debug, and explain a RAG system confidently.

What you’ll get

1. 🔗 12 hand-picked URLs (blogs, docs, diagrams)
2. 🧠 My notes on each link
3. Why this matters
4. When to use it
5. Common mistakes
6. 🧱 End-to-end RAG architecture
7. Ingestion
8. Chunking
9. Embeddings
10. Retrieval
11. Generation
12. 💰 Cost & performance insights (what actually increases latency & bills)
13. 🛠️ Tool-agnostic thinking (works with OpenAI / open-source / local)

Topics covered

1. RAG mental model (simple → production)
2. Chunking strategies that actually work
3. Vector DB selection logic
4. Retrieval vs re-ranking trade-offs
5. Prompt + context window optimization
6. Where RAG systems usually break

Format & delivery

1. 📄 Notion page (lifetime access)
2. 📎 Bonus: architecture sketch + checklist