Title: Discussion 8 — Graph vs. Agent: Picking Your Battles
Course: AIINFRA 301: Production RAG & LLMOps — Observability and Evaluation > Section: Week 08 — Advanced Retrieval Patterns: GraphRAG and Agentic RAG

💬 Discussion 8 — Graph vs. Agent: Picking Your Battles (20 pts)

Prompt: Imagine you're advising a single company on retrieval over their internal wiki (policies, project docs, meeting notes, etc.) — a single, moderately sized corpus that doesn't change too often. Would the offline cost of building a full GraphRAG knowledge graph over that wiki pay off compared to a cheaper agentic RAG loop (e.g., a LangGraph agent that just does vector search, critiques its own results, and re-retrieves when needed) run over the same documents? In your initial post (150+ words), take a position and justify it using at least one specific property of the expected questions employees would ask — for example, are most questions likely to be narrow lookups ("what's our PTO policy?"), or broad synthesis questions ("what are the recurring blockers across all of engineering's retro notes this year?")? Explain how that property tips the answer toward GraphRAG's upfront investment or toward the agentic loop's pay-as-you-go flexibility. Then respond to two peers. Where you disagree with a peer's position, don't just state the opposite conclusion — point to the specific assumption about question type or corpus behavior that's driving the difference, and explain what evidence (e.g., a sample of real employee questions) would settle it.