Building a RAG Pipeline From Scratch: What SmartQueue Taught Me About Retrieval (opens in new tab)

When I set out to add an AI assistant to SmartQueue, a distributed task queue I'd already built in Go for handling IT support tickets, the obvious move was to bolt on an LLM and call it done. Type a question, get an answer. But a generic LLM doesn't know your company's password reset procedure, your P1 outage runbook, or that refunds need manager approval above $500. It needed grounding in actual internal knowledge. That's the job retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is built for: pull the re...