In Q3 2024, 72% of production RAG pipelines failed to meet p99 latency SLAs for multimodal queries, according to a Datadog survey of 1,200 engineering teams. Most blamed fragmented toolchains for text and image retrieval—until Stable Diffusion 3.0’s embedding API and Llama 4’s 1M-token context window changed the game. This is the definitive guide to building unified multimodal RAG pipelines that c
There's a moment every developer knows. You need to generate a PDF. It looks simple. You've done harder things. Three hours later, you're reading a Stack Overflow thread from 2016 that ends with "works on my machine." This post is about that moment — the actual options, what breaks in each, and where I landed after years of hitting this in production. It uses a stripped-down WebKit engine and conv