Search the indexed documents and return the most relevant passages.

Retrieval only: no text is generated, so this is the cheap and fast call. Prefer it when you want source material to read and quote yourself. Returns each passage with its document id, ordinal, relevance score and chunk_id; pass a chunk_id to rag_get_document to read around it. Use rag_answer instead only if you want the service to compose the answer.

Read one indexed chunk in full, together with its neighbouring chunks.

Use this after rag_search when a passage is relevant but truncated and you need the surrounding text. chunk_id comes from rag_search output. context is how many chunks either side to include (0-5, default 1). This is an exact lookup by id, not another search, so it costs nothing to run.

Read an entire indexed document, in order.

Use when a document is clearly the right source and you want all of it rather than retrieved fragments. Large documents produce long output — prefer rag_search or rag_read_around when you only need one section.

Report what is indexed and how the RAG service is configured.

Returns the collection name, chunk count, embedding and chat models, the active reranker and whether tracing is enabled. Call this first when a search returns nothing, to tell an empty index from a bad query.

Ask the RAG service to generate an answer, with its sources and trace.

This calls a language model, so it is slower and costs money; prefer rag_search when you intend to read the passages and answer yourself. Returns the answer, the documents it drew on, the per-stage latency breakdown and the cost of the query in USD.