Street-fighting RAG: Chain-of-thought prompting
This is the first article from my "street-fighting RAG" series: quick, dirty, and effective tricks for better Retrieval-Augmented Generation apps, based on developing systems for a crime-based online game
I build LLM-based non-player characters (NPCs) for a popular online game. The game exists in a constrained-reality: it's based (kind of!) in the real world, but with a limited and fixed set of real-world items you can interact with:
You have an Endurance stat, but it applies purely to your in-game-career performance, and not at all to your gains at the in-game gym or to fighting other players
If -- like us -- you want to use an off-the-shelf model, this is a big freakin' problem. The LLM already has a strong, everyday association with how “endurance” should relate to the gym, has strong opinions on whether or not a boomerang is a “throwing weapon”, and is quite convinced that Lithuania is a real place with fun things you can do there. In order to do what we want, we need to explain an awful lot about our constrained reality first!
I'll cover solving these problems more in future articles, but for now let it suffice to say: I have LLM hallucination challenges that would make you grimace.
