Lessons learned building a no-hallucination RAG for Islamic finance similarity gates beat prompt engineering

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Lessons learned building a no-hallucination RAG for Islamic finance similarity gates beat prompt engineering I kept getting blocked trying to share this so I'll cut straight to the technical meat. The problem: Islamic finance rulings vary by jurisdiction and a wrong answer has real consequences. Telling an LLM "refuse if unsure" in a system prompt is not enough. It still speculates. The fix that actually worked: kill the LLM call entirely at retrieval time. If top-k chunks score below 0.7 cos...