01
Ask Zico: Production Architecture And Request Flow
A system map of Ask Zico: the PHP trust boundary, Cloudflare Worker, evidence stores, model providers, operational state, and end-to-end request lifecycle.
Ask Zico
9 articles in this series
02
Design Alternatives: Why Ask Zico Uses Controlled Retrieval
The project-specific evidence behind Ask Zico's controlled retrieval, stable identity, internal semantic routing, and application-owned ranking.
03
Ingestion Pipeline: Turning Arabic Site Content Into Citation-Ready RAG Chunks
How Ask Zico preserves readable Arabic, normalized search text, deterministic per-build IDs, metadata, and coordinated retrieval artifacts.
04
Retrieval Pipeline: Hybrid Arabic Search With Stable Citations
The launched Ask Zico retrieval pipeline: Arabic normalization, semantic routing, Vectorize, lexical shards, filters, rank fusion, and KV hydration.
05
Grounded Answer Generation: Turning Retrieved Arabic Evidence Into Safe Answers
How Ask Zico compacts evidence, routes provider capacity, validates citation IDs, refreshes follow-up evidence, and deliberately falls back.
06
Evaluation: Making An Arabic RAG Assistant Earn Its Citations
A layered evaluation method for Arabic retrieval, answer correctness, citation precision, refusals, regressions, and production feedback.
07
UX: Designing A Trust-Calibrated Arabic RAG Assistant
How the launched Ask Zico interface uses Arabic-first copy, visible sources, deliberate fallback, quota states, feedback, and mobile reading behavior to calibrate trust.
08
Observability: Operating A Citation-Bound Arabic RAG Assistant
How Ask Zico uses structured D1 events, retrieval metadata, provider attempts, quota outcomes, CPU phases, and message-linked feedback without publishing private traffic.
09
Economics: Keeping A Public RAG Assistant Sustainable
A dated, privacy-safe cost model for Ask Zico covering exact quota reservation, provider routing, compact context, fallback, counters, and alerts.