Compound AI Systems: Beyond Simple Prompts

RAG is powerful, but it’s just the beginning. Real-world AI applications rarely solve problems with a single prompt-response interaction. They require orchestrated sequences of tasks, multiple model calls, and intelligent routing between components.

These are compound AI systems — architectures that combine multiple AI components to solve complex problems that single models can’t handle alone.

The Landscape of AI Systems

Different problems require different system architectures.

1. Prompt Engineering

The simplest approach uses carefully crafted prompts with a single LLM.

Components:

• Prompt generation logic
• LLM

This works for straightforward tasks. Draft an email. Summarize a document. Answer a simple question.

But prompt engineering alone hits limits quickly. Context windows fill up. Complex reasoning fails. Multi-step processes become unwieldy.

2. Unstructured Docs RAG

This is retrieval-augmented generation for documents. And I don’t intend to make another RAG tutorial.