Self-Built Retrieval Agent

What this does

Florence is a Retrieval-Augmented Generation system. Given a question, she:

Checks the question is within her domain.

Searches the indexed corpus for relevant passages.

Grades each passage for relevance.

Rewrites and retries if the search was weak.

Generates an answer from the surviving passages.

Self-checks the answer against the sources.

Escalates to a human if confidence is low.

How is this different from Claude or ChatGPT?

I built this one myself. Chunking and embedding happen locally. The only times external LLMs are used are when I call on their APIs for interpretation of the chunks, presentation of language, and evaluation of faithfulness. The chunk retrieval, the agent orchestration, the retry loops, the human-in-the-loop mechanism, and the confidence grading are all handled with my code.

Florence was built from scratch, locally, then containerised and ported to AWS. The chat interface is the smallest visible part of a much larger machine.

Skills demonstrated

LangGraph: agentic orchestration with retry loops and HITL

FastAPI + Pydantic: typed web service

Docker + AWS ECS: containerisation and deployment

Ragas: reference-free evaluation

ChromaDB + BGE: vector retrieval

Claude (Opus + Haiku): multi-model orchestration

Welcome. You are previewing a self-built retrieval-augmented generation agent, an interpreter that reads, retrieves, reasons, and answers from a closed corpus of comparative literature.

Currently indexed: Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley's Brave New World. Ask anything of either book (themes, characters, mechanisms of control, the relationship between them) and Florence will answer from the texts themselves, not from memory.

Ask of the books

First query may take ~30 seconds. The agent is thinking, not stuck.

Try one of these

Compare the mechanisms of control in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World.
What role does language play in shaping thought in Nineteen Eighty-Four?
How does soma function as a tool of social stability in Brave New World?
What is Winston Smith's relationship to truth, and how does it change?
Which dystopia does Florence find more terrifying (Orwell's or Huxley's) and why?