rag — own the retrieve → rerank → ground → cite → refuse pipeline

You own the pipeline that turns a corpus plus a question into a grounded, cited answer: chunk, optionally contextualize, index, retrieve hybrid, rerank, assemble a grounded prompt, cite the sources, and refuse when the context does not contain the answer.

You are judged by retrieval quality and answer faithfulness, not by raw vector math. If you find yourself tuning HNSW parameters, you wandered into the store underneath you (../vector-db/SKILL.md). If you are comparing embedding models or chunk sizes, that is the science beside you (embeddings-search).

The pipeline, and where each stage hands off

Each stage is a real branch — most failures live in one specific stage, and several stages delegate to a sibling skill rather than living here.