Towards Data Science

Larger Context Windows Don’t Fix RAG — So I Built a System That Does

Increasing context size in RAG systems doesn’t improve accuracy for aggregation tasks—it makes errors harder to detect. In this article, I benchmark retrieval-based pipelines against a deterministic full-scan engine across 100,000 rows and show why computation queries must be routed away from RAG entirely.

Towards Data Science
Jul 16

Context Engineering for RAG Question Parsing: From a Raw Question to Typed Fields That Steer Retrieval and Generation

Enterprise Document Intelligence [Vol. 1 #6quater] - Question parsing takes one messy string and writes four typed pieces, each read by a different downstream call The post Context Engineering for RAG Question Parsing: From a Raw Question to Typed Fields That Steer Retrieval and Generation appeared first on Towards Data Science .

By Kezhan Shi
Towards Data Science
Aug 29

RAG Is Not the Whole Toolkit: The NLP Techniques Real Problems Still Need

The article argues that Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is only one tool in NLP, and many real-world problems—such as request classification, free‑text matching, table reading, and OCR noise cleaning—are better served by simpler, cheaper techniques. It emphasizes the importance of selecting the appropriate method for each task and highlights the engineering challenge of knowing which technique to apply.

By Kezhan Shi
Towards Data Science
May 29

RAG Is Burning Money — I Built a Cost Control Layer to Fix It

Most RAG systems are optimized for answer quality, not cost—and that blind spot gets expensive fast. In this article, I break down a production-ready cost control layer combining semantic caching, query routing, token budgeting, and circuit breaking, achieving an 85% reduction in LLM costs without sacrificing answer quality.

By Emmimal P Alexander