System Architecture

RAG Pipeline Blueprint.

rag_telemetry.log
Active Trace

# RAG System Architecture : Execution Trace

$ rag.execute --query "Explain production vector indexing"

[01] Gateway: Auth verified · Rate limit OK (0.8ms)

[02] Embed: text-embedding-3-small → 1536d vector (21ms)

[03] VectorDB: Pinecone ANN search top_k=10 (17ms)

[04] Rerank: Cohere cross-encoder top_n=3 (34ms)

[05] LLM: Claude 3.5 Sonnet streaming initialized (142ms TTFT)

# Status: Grounded · 0 Hallucinations · 214ms Total Pipeline

STAGE 4 OF 6

Vector Database

ANN Similarity Search

Performs approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search using HNSW indexing across millions of pre-chunked document vectors with metadata filtering.

// Code Implementation Pattern

const matches = await pineconeIndex.query({
  vector: embedding.data[0].embedding,
  topK: 10,
  includeMetadata: true,
});
PineconeWeaviatepgvectorHNSW
Recall Rate96.4%
Search Latency18ms
Top-K Chunks10

Architecture Principles.

Decoupled Pipelines

Each stage is modular and independently scalable. Embedding providers or vector DBs can be swapped without code rewrites.

Full Telemetry & Evals

Latency, token count, and RAGAS metrics (faithfulness, relevancy) are tracked across all pipeline executions.

Graceful Fallbacks

Hybrid search with BM25 keyword matching ensures relevance even if dense vector embedding similarity drops.

Guardrails & Grounding

System prompts and post-generation citation checkers ensure 0 hallucinations and strict source attribution.