From zero to a RAG system: successes and failures

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

Puter.js - The Backend for AI-Generated Apps
One-shot full-stack apps with your existing AI coding tool. Puter.js gives you Auth, Storage, DB, AI & more, with up to 90% fewer AI tokens than other backend platforms.
developer.puter.com
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AppSignal knows why the f*#k it crashed.
Stop vibe-debugging. Every exception, every backtrace, grouped so you see patterns, not noise.
www.appsignal.com
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  1. chroma

    Search infrastructure for AI

  2. Puter.js

    Puter.js - The Backend for AI-Generated Apps. One-shot full-stack apps with your existing AI coding tool. Puter.js gives you Auth, Storage, DB, AI & more, with up to 90% fewer AI tokens than other backend platforms.

    Puter.js logo
  3. tldw_server

    tl/dw (Too Long, Didn't Watch): Your Personal Research Multi-Tool - a naive attempt at 'A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer' (Open Source NotebookLM)

    If you don’t mind a little instability while I work out the bugs, might be interested in my project: https://github.com/rmusser01/tldw_server ; it’s not quite fully ready yet but the backend api is functional and has a full RAG system with a customizable and tweakable local-first ETL so you can use it without relying on any third party services.

  4. serapeum

    A local-first, self-hosted research assistant inspired by NotebookLM. Built with R and Shiny. Named after the Serapeum of Alexandria, the daughter library of the ancient Library of Alexandria. (by seanthimons)

    Oh! Same! I made an R / Shiny powered RAG/ Researching app that hooks into OpenAlex (for papers) and allows you to generate NotebookLM like outputs. Just got slides with from-paper images to be injected in, super fun. Takes an OpenRouter or local LLMs (if that's your thing). Network graphs too! https://github.com/seanthimons/serapeum/

  5. fufus

    Discontinued A clone of Amazon Rufus, an AI agent for shopping online.

    Why did you opt for semantic search, and not plain old full text search? I built an "AI Agent for a Commerce Website" as a take-home exercise yesterday, and I chose to simply give the model a tool that does a full text search over products, powered by MiniSearch, I think it works reasonably well. I believe this is also what Claude Code does.

    https://github.com/dprkh/fufus/

  6. qmd

    mini cli search engine for your docs, knowledge bases, meeting notes, whatever. Tracking current sota approaches while being all local

  7. AppSignal

    AppSignal knows why the f*#k it crashed. Stop vibe-debugging. Every exception, every backtrace, grouped so you see patterns, not noise.

    AppSignal logo
NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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