Simon Willison Will Find You

You're scrolling Gergely's feed, minding your business, and then — there's Simon. Explaining RAG. In like six posts. Perfectly.

The "big tech small town" thing is real and it never stops being funny. Every corner of the internet that's worth a damn eventually has Simon Willison in it, and not in the way that's annoying, but in the way where you're relieved he showed up because now you understand what you were looking at.

This particular RAG breakdown — rapid-fire, no throat-clearing, no "retrieval-augmented generation is a technique that" — just: here is the thing, here is why it falls apart, here is where people get it wrong, next. It's the kind of explanation that makes you realize how much of what gets written about RAG is just people describing it without having actually used it anywhere that mattered.

The small-world part is not the point. The point is that when someone does a perfect ten-second teardown of a concept that most companies are currently getting wrong in production, you stop and watch it twice. Then you send it to everyone. Then you find out they already saw it.