Home / nahid-sparktales / agent-dispatcher · skills/ai/retrieval-rag/SKILL.md · GitHub

retrieval-rag skillA

retrieval-rag is agent-read markdown (skill) from nahid-sparktales/agent-dispatcher: Build and fix retrieval that actually returns the right passage — structure-aware chunking, one pinned embedding model, lexical plus vector search fused, reranking, and a recall measurement that is run separately from the generator. Use when a RAG system answers wrong or vaguely, when an index is being designed or reindexed, or when someone proposes a prompt change to fix what is really a retrieval miss. Not for prompt or output-quality work once the right passage is already in context, not for .

Indexed from public GitHub and served as immutable, content-addressed versions. Install it pinned to an exact SHA-256 with the mdr CLI, and every file is verified against the hash recorded here before it reaches your agent. The deterministic audit below grades the latest version, and the same file always earns the same grade.

What the file says

# Retrieval for RAG

Most "the model hallucinated" reports are retrieval failures wearing a generation costume. The
gold passage was never in the context window, and no prompt edit can fix that. The first job is
always to find out which half is broken.

## When this fires

A system retrieves documents and feeds them to a model, and the answers are wrong, thin, or
unsourced — or an index is being built or rebuilt. It does not fire when the correct passage is
demonstrably in context and the model still answers badly; that is a generation problem.

## Procedure

1. **Split the failure before fixing anything.** Take 10 real failing questions. For each, check
   whether the passage that answers it appears in the retrieved set at all. Retrieved and answered
   wrong is a generation problem; never retrieved is a retrieval problem. Do not proceed on a
   guess — this one check redirects most of the work.
2. **Build the evaluation set before touching the index.** 30–50 real questions, each labelled
   with the id(s) of the passage that answers it. Get them from real logs where possible. Without
   this set every later change is a reshuffle you cannot tell from an improvement.
…

Read the whole file at its exact version.

How to install

Latest version
mdr add nahid-sparktales/agent-dispatcher/retrieval-rag@git:20260919.a0d4f55
Exact content
mdr add nahid-sparktales/agent-dispatcher/retrieval-rag@sha256:0f9790a151c040f1

Pin to a label to follow the author's releases, or to a sha256 to freeze the exact bytes forever. Either way the resolved hash is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install reproduces it on any machine.

Badge

mdr badge

[![mdr](https://markdownregistry.com/badge/art_3bwyh3ha3kssqwis.svg)](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_3bwyh3ha3kssqwis)

1 badge views in 30 days

Versions

versioncommittedcommitsizeaudit
git:20260919.a0d4f55 latest2026-09-19 a0d4f55 7,096 BA view

Audit of the latest version

A  17 of 17 checks passed. Deterministic, no model, same answer every run.
  • pass: Frontmatter block present
  • pass: Frontmatter declares a name
  • pass: Frontmatter declares a description
  • pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (7096 bytes)
  • pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
  • pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
  • pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
  • pass: No credential-shaped string
  • pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
  • pass: No text hidden with inline styles
  • pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
  • pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
  • pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
  • pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
  • pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
  • pass: No link to a raw IP address
  • pass: No script tag

Source

GitHub

nahid-sparktales/agent-dispatcher · 49 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-09-23 · branch main

API

GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_3bwyh3ha3kssqwis
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=nahid-sparktales/agent-dispatcher/retrieval-rag
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/0f9790a151c040f1a93523c19996129e6ffc15625cdbd1670df7bc6447bb7f57

Your agent does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.

More from nahid-sparktales/agent-dispatcher

agent-dispatcher skill
nahid-sparktales/agent-dispatcher · skills/agent-dispatcher/SKILL.md · Route work to a specialist role and load its task-specific guidance. Use when the user invokes /agent-dispatcher, names…
git:20260920.c183eff · audit A · 49 stars
agent-design skill
nahid-sparktales/agent-dispatcher · skills/ai/agent-design/SKILL.md · Scope an agent or subagent before it is built — the one job it owns, the smallest tool set that closes that job, what…
git:20260919.a0d4f55 · audit A · 49 stars
agent-evals skill
nahid-sparktales/agent-dispatcher · skills/ai/agent-evals/SKILL.md · Build an eval suite that can actually detect a regression — cases pulled from real traffic, graders that check…
git:20260919.a0d4f55 · audit A · 49 stars
context-engineering skill
nahid-sparktales/agent-dispatcher · skills/ai/context-engineering/SKILL.md · Decide what actually occupies the model's window — progressive disclosure through an index, retrieval versus inlining…
git:20260919.a0d4f55 · audit A · 49 stars
llm-observability skill
nahid-sparktales/agent-dispatcher · skills/ai/llm-observability/SKILL.md · See what an agent actually did — one trace per run with nested model, tool and retrieval spans, token and latency…
git:20260919.a0d4f55 · audit A · 49 stars
mcp-design skill
nahid-sparktales/agent-dispatcher · skills/ai/mcp-design/SKILL.md · Build an MCP server, or bring an existing one into a project — choosing the transport, deciding which tools, resources…
git:20260919.a0d4f55 · audit A · 49 stars
memory-design skill
nahid-sparktales/agent-dispatcher · skills/ai/memory-design/SKILL.md · Decide what an agent should remember, which layer holds it, who it is scoped to, and how a stale or contradicted memory…
git:20260919.a0d4f55 · audit A · 49 stars
model-routing skill
nahid-sparktales/agent-dispatcher · skills/ai/model-routing/SKILL.md · Pick a model per job and degrade sensibly when one fails — a quality bar per call site, candidates compared on the same…
git:20260919.a0d4f55 · audit A · 49 stars
prompt-engineering skill
nahid-sparktales/agent-dispatcher · skills/ai/prompt-engineering/SKILL.md · Write or revise a prompt so it holds up — output contract, instruction placement, examples that earn their place, an…
git:20260919.a0d4f55 · audit A · 49 stars
prompt-injection-defense skill
nahid-sparktales/agent-dispatcher · skills/ai/prompt-injection-defense/SKILL.md · Treat everything an agent reads but did not author as data rather than instructions — an explicit trust boundary, a…
git:20260919.a0d4f55 · audit A · 49 stars
structured-output skill
nahid-sparktales/agent-dispatcher · skills/ai/structured-output/SKILL.md · Get parseable, trustworthy structured results out of a model — schema design, the enforcement mechanism the provider…
git:20260919.a0d4f55 · audit A · 49 stars
tool-design skill
nahid-sparktales/agent-dispatcher · skills/ai/tool-design/SKILL.md · Design the tools a model calls — names, parameter shapes, what a result returns, and error text written as an…
git:20260919.a0d4f55 · audit A · 49 stars

Every file in nahid-sparktales/agent-dispatcher

Browse by kind, by grade A, or by owner.