Field notes

Blog

Short essays from the team on agentic search, retrieval pipelines, and the parts of LLM-mediated lookup that bite you in production.

  • Source-aware retrieval: knowing what your engine knows

    Most search engines hide their backends behind a single answer. slorg shows you which engines returned which URLs, what content was actually extracted, and what the LLM scored each one — because retrieval without source awareness is just confident guessing.

    retrievaltransparencydesign
  • Planning the search: where the latency budget really goes

    A breakdown of the three LLM calls and N content fetches that make up a slorg query, what each one costs, and which knobs actually move the needle.

    latencyperformancedesign
  • Most agentic search throws queries at Google and prays

    Why the dominant pattern in LLM-mediated search is functionally a wrapper around a single search call — and what changes when you make the plan the first artifact, not the last.

    agentic searchretrievaldesign