RAG Prompt Engineering: Context Placement & Citation Strategies › Key Parameters
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The key parameters for the RAG prompt builder form a configuration space that determines the information-theoretic properties of the final context window. These parameters interact in ways that affect both the computational complexity and the semantic fidelity of the retrieval augmentation:
| Parameter | Description | Options | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| max_context_tokens | Maximum tokens for retrieved context | 1000-8000+ | Controls total information capacity |
ordering | Document sequence strategy | "relevance", "chronological", "clustered" | Affects attention distribution |
truncation | Token allocation method | "uniform", "weighted", "head_only", "sliding_window" | Determines information preservation |
The parameters interact in non-obvious ways. A large max_context_tokens budget combined with "uniform" truncation may hurt performance if it means every document gets truncated to the same short length, losing the detail in the most relevant documents. A smaller budget with "weighted" truncation may produce better results because the highest-relevance documents receive enough space to present their content coherently. Similarly, "chronological" ordering is only useful when your retrieval scores are not well-calibrated for temporal relevance; if your retriever already down-weights old documents appropriately, chronological ordering just overrides that calibration.