> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.ragrails.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Overview

> The Ragrails advantages you turn on when basic RAG is not enough.

Capabilities are the Ragrails advantages you turn on when basic RAG is not enough. They cover stronger retrieval, better multi-turn behavior, live progress, recoverable ingestion, provider extension, tool use, and lower operating cost.

| Problem                                                             | Start here                                               | Why                                                                                      |
| ------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Vector search finds the topic but ranks weak chunks first           | [Reranking](/capabilities/reranking)                     | Retrieve a wider candidate set, then reorder by query-specific relevance.                |
| Follow-up questions like "what about the second one?" search poorly | [Query Rewriting](/capabilities/query-rewriting)         | Rewrite conversational turns into standalone search queries.                             |
| Long chats become costly, slow, or overconfident                    | [Chat Tuning](/capabilities/chat-tuning)                 | Tune history compaction, intent routing, retrieval quality, and low-confidence behavior. |
| A crawl or API pull partly fails                                    | [Resilient Ingestion](/capabilities/resilient-ingestion) | Capture retryable failures and safely page through large APIs.                           |
| Users wait too long for crawls or answers                           | [Streaming](/capabilities/streaming)                     | Emit progress, token, error, and final result events over SDK or REST.                   |
| Interactive chat needs live lookup or side effects                  | [Agentic Tools](/capabilities/agentic-tools)             | Use the built-in CLI tool loop with `web_fetch` and `api_call`.                          |
| You want to build your own tool loop                                | [Tool Calling](/capabilities/tool-calling)               | Use provider-neutral message and tool-call dataclasses.                                  |
| You need an embedding or reranking provider Ragrails does not ship  | [Custom Providers](/capabilities/custom-providers)       | Register a provider factory at application startup.                                      |
| Spend is too high                                                   | [Cost Optimization](/capabilities/cost-optimization)     | Reduce LLM calls, context size, re-embedding, and API reranking.                         |

## How capabilities attach

| Area                | SDK                                                                                                           | CLI                                                    | REST API                                          |
| ------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------- |
| Reranking           | `retrieve(..., use_rerank=True)`, `query(retrieval={"rerank": ...})`, `chat(..., retrieval_config=...)`       | `retrieve --rerank`, `query --rerank`, `chat --rerank` | `/v1/retrieve`, `/v1/pipelines/query`, `/v1/chat` |
| Query rewriting     | `retrieve(..., use_query_rewrite=True)`, `query(retrieval={"query_rewrite": ...})`, `chat(query_rewrite=...)` | `chat --rewrite-query`                                 | `/v1/retrieve`, `/v1/pipelines/query`, `/v1/chat` |
| Chat quality        | `ChatRetrievalQualityConfig`                                                                                  | Not exposed as flags yet                               | `retrieval_quality` object on `/v1/chat`          |
| History controls    | `HistoryCompactionConfig`, `IntentRoutingConfig`                                                              | `--history-compaction`, `--intent-routing`             | `history_compaction`, `intent_routing`            |
| Streaming           | `scrape_stream(...)`, `chat_stream(...)`                                                                      | Interactive chat REPL streaming                        | `/v1/ingest/url/stream`, `/v1/chat/stream`        |
| Resilient ingestion | `DLQ`, `fetch(..., pagination=...)`                                                                           | Ingestion commands                                     | Ingestion endpoints                               |
| Tool use            | LLM `complete_with_tools()`                                                                                   | Interactive `ragrails chat`                            | Not exposed as a server route yet                 |

## Recommended order

1. Get [extraction through chat](/features/pipeline-overview) working first.
2. Add [reranking](/capabilities/reranking) when retrieval order is the issue.
3. Add [query rewriting](/capabilities/query-rewriting) when multi-turn queries are the issue.
4. Tune [chat quality](/capabilities/chat-tuning) before exposing answers in production.
5. Add [streaming](/capabilities/streaming) when users need progress or token events.
6. Add [maintenance](/features/knowledge-base-maintenance) and [resilient ingestion](/capabilities/resilient-ingestion) for long-lived indexes.