2025-05-12 Calibrate Conference

Agentic workflows and RAG with LlamaIndex

What are we talking about?

• What is LlamaIndex
• What is an agent?
• Why build agents?
• What is RAG?
• Why agents need RAG
• Agent Patterns in LlamaIndex
  • Chaining
  • Routing
  • Parallelization
  • Orchestrator-Workers
  • Evaluator-Optimizer
• Demo!

What is LlamaIndex?

Python: docs.llamaindex.ai

TypeScript: ts.llamaindex.ai

LlamaParse

World's best parser of complex documents

Free for 10000 pages/month!

cloud.llamaindex.ai

LlamaCloud

Turn-key RAG API for Enterprises

Available as SaaS or private cloud deployment

Sign up at cloud.llamaindex.ai

LlamaHub

llamahub.ai

Why LlamaIndex?

• Build faster
• Skip the boilerplate
• Avoid early pitfalls
• Get best practices for free
• Go from prototype to production

What can you build in LlamaIndex?

• Lots of stuff! Especially...
• AI agents
• RAG

What is an agent?

Semi-autonomous software

that uses tools to accomplish a goal

Agentic programming is a new paradigm

When does an agent make sense?

When your data is messy, which is most of the time

LLMs are good at turning lots of text into less text

LLMs work well under the hood

You don't have to build a chatbot

LLMs need data

The solution is RAG

RAG = infinite context

Agents need RAG

and RAG needs agents

Building Effective Agents

anthropic.com/research/building-effective-agents

• Chaining
• Routing
• Parallelization
• Orchestrator-Workers
• Evaluator-Optimizer

Chaining

Routing

Parallelization

Sectioning

Parallelization: flavor 1

Voting

Parallelization: flavor 2

Orchestrator-Workers

Evaluator-Optimizer

aka Self-reflection

Arbitrary complexity

Workbook time!

bit.ly/calibrate-llamaindex

What's next?

bit.ly/llamaindex-discord

Thanks!

Follow me on BlueSky:

🦋 @seldo.com

bit.ly/calibrate-slides