Agent Framework RAG for Agents: Giving Your Agent the Right Context

This is Part 13 of my series on the Microsoft Agent Framework. You can read the original post over on lukaswalter.dev . In the previous article , we looked at workflows. Workflows make sense when the process itself needs structure: state, checkpoints, events, human approvals, and resumable execution. This post is the bridge from Agent Framework into RAG. I plan on doing a full RAG deep dive sometime later. The practical question for now is smaller: How do I connect an Agent Framework agent to private application knowledge without stuffing every document into the prompt? For agents, RAG is less about adding more text and more about giving the agent a controlled retrieval path. The agent should fetch the right context at the point where it needs it. Agents do not know your private data Your company documents, product catalog, tickets, rules, policies, runbooks, and internal knowledge base live outside the model. The model has generic knowledge. Your application has private knowledge. Treat those as separate systems. You can paste some private data into the prompt, and for a demo that may be enough. But this falls apart quickly: full documents are expensive to send repeatedly long prompts are fragile stale documents may sit next to current ones users may not be allowed to see every source long context still needs selection The last point is easy to underestimate. A larger context window lets you send more text. It does not decide which text is correct, current, relevant, or permitted. Do not give the agent all knowledge. Give it the right context at the moment it needs it. Retrieval owns that job. The minimal RAG shape The basic RAG loop is small: user question -> retrieve relevant chunks -> pass chunks to the agent -> agent answers using that context For documents, the longer pipeline usually looks like this: documents -> chunks -> embeddings -> vector store -> search -> retrieved context -> agent response Documents are split into smaller chunks. Those chunks are embe