Building a production RAG across a Book series: Retrieval, Reranking, and Hard Lessons

I built a search and Q&A system over the entire A Song of Ice and Fire series, all 10 books, ~66,000 paragraphs. The project is called Uma Busca de Gelo e Fogo, and it's live at . Ask it something that requires actual reasoning across the books, not just keyword lookup, and see how the retrieval holds up.

The main thing I learned building this is that RAG quality is determined by the weakest link in the pipeline, and the weakest link is usually not the LLM. It's the chunk boundaries. It's the retrieval strategy. It's the prompt contract. None of those are obvious until they're broken in production.

Happy to discuss any of it in the comments.