I recently came across a weekend project shared by Michael Vicente, and it changed how I think about building AI-powered applications.

Michael built a Retrieval-Augmented Generation system for AIO Growth, connecting ChatGPT to a database containing more than 5,000 AI tools. The goal was to provide fast and personalized tool recommendations without sending the entire database to the AI every time someone submitted a question.

At first, the idea of connecting AI to thousands of tools sounded like it would require sending a massive amount of information with every request. That would consume more tokens, increase costs, and potentially make the application slower.

Michael approached the problem differently.

Instead of giving ChatGPT access to everything at once, his system follows three focused steps.