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
User types "android" into your search box. That's 7 API calls if you wired it the way I did the first time. A few months later I shipped a pagination bug where every infinite-scroll fetch flashed a full-screen loader for half a second. And then there was the Settings screen that needed to refresh the Dashboard when the user changed theme — but Settings couldn't import Dashboard without a circular