mcpbeat

Dspy Haystack Integration

omidzamani/dspy-haystack-integration

Use for integrating DSPy with Haystack, optimizing Haystack prompts, improving retrieval pipelines, and extracting DSPy prompts.

3k tokens
context cost
the whole folder, loaded on every use
4
files
ships runnable scripts
0
copies elsewhere
how many repositories repackaged it
119
stars on the repo
on the repository, not the skill itself

Install

one command, takes just this skill from the repository
npx skills add https://github.com/OmidZamani/dspy-skills --skill dspy-haystack-integration

What comes with it

6 916 bytes besides the instruction
example.py
examples/haystack-dspy-optimizer.py
references/prompt-extraction.md

The instruction itself

15 sections, as written by the author

DSPy + Haystack Integration

Goal

Use DSPy's optimization capabilities to automatically improve prompts in Haystack pipelines.

When to Use

  • You have existing Haystack pipelines
  • Manual prompt tuning is tedious
  • Need data-driven prompt optimization
  • Want to combine Haystack components with DSPy optimization

Inputs

| Input | Type | Description |

|-------|------|-------------|

| haystack_pipeline | Pipeline | Existing Haystack pipeline |

| trainset | list[dspy.Example] | Training examples |

| metric | callable | Evaluation function |

Outputs

| Output | Type | Description |

|--------|------|-------------|

| optimized_prompt | str | DSPy-optimized prompt |

| optimized_pipeline | Pipeline | Updated Haystack pipeline |

Workflow

Phase 1: Build Initial Haystack Pipeline

from haystack import Pipeline
from haystack.components.generators import OpenAIGenerator
from haystack.components.builders import PromptBuilder
from haystack.components.retrievers.in_memory import InMemoryBM25Retriever
from haystack.document_stores.in_memory import InMemoryDocumentStore

# Setup document store
doc_store = InMemoryDocumentStore()
doc_store.write_documents(documents)

# Initial generic prompt
initial_prompt = """
Context: {{context}}
Question: {{question}}
Answer:
"""

# Build pipeline
pipeline = Pipeline()
pipeline.add_component("retriever", InMemoryBM25Retriever(document_store=doc_store))
pipeline.add_component("prompt_builder", PromptBuilder(template=initial_prompt))
pipeline.add_component("generator", OpenAIGenerator(model="gpt-4o-mini"))

pipeline.connect("retriever", "prompt_builder.context")
pipeline.connect("prompt_builder", "generator")

Phase 2: Create DSPy RAG Module

import dspy

class HaystackRAG(dspy.Module):
    """DSPy module wrapping Haystack retriever."""
    
    def __init__(self, retriever, k=3):
        super().__init__()
        self.retriever = retriever
        self.k = k
        self.generate = dspy.ChainOfThought("context, question -> answer")
    
    def forward(self, question):
        # Use Haystack retriever
        results = self.retriever.run(query=question, top_k=self.k)
        context = [doc.content for doc in results['documents']]
        
        # Use DSPy for generation
        pred = self.generate(context=context, question=question)
        return dspy.Prediction(context=context, answer=pred.answer)

Phase 3: Define Custom Metric

from haystack.components.evaluators import SASEvaluator

# Haystack semantic evaluator
sas_evaluator = SASEvaluator(model="sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2")

def mixed_metric(example, pred, trace=None):
    """Combine semantic accuracy with conciseness."""
    
    # Semantic similarity (Haystack SAS)
    sas_result = sas_evaluator.run(
        ground_truth_answers=[example.answer],
        predicted_answers=[pred.answer]
    )
    semantic_score = sas_result['score']
    
    # Conciseness penalty
    word_count = len(pred.answer.split())
    conciseness = 1.0 if word_count <= 20 else max(0, 1 - (word_count - 20) / 50)
    
    return 0.7 * semantic_score + 0.3 * conciseness

Phase 4: Optimize with DSPy

from dspy.teleprompt import BootstrapFewShot

lm = dspy.LM("openai/gpt-4o-mini")
dspy.configure(lm=lm)

# Create DSPy module with Haystack retriever
rag_module = HaystackRAG(retriever=pipeline.get_component("retriever"))

# Optimize
optimizer = BootstrapFewShot(
    metric=mixed_metric,
    max_bootstrapped_demos=4,
    max_labeled_demos=4
)

compiled = optimizer.compile(rag_module, trainset=trainset)

Phase 5: Extract and Apply Optimized Prompt

After optimization, extract the optimized prompt and apply it to your Haystack pipeline.

See Prompt Extraction Guide for detailed steps on:

  • Extracting prompts from compiled DSPy modules
  • Mapping DSPy demos to Haystack templates
  • Building optimized Haystack pipelines

Production Example

For a complete production-ready implementation, see HaystackDSPyOptimizer.

This class provides:

  • Wrapper for Haystack retrievers in DSPy modules
  • Automatic optimization with BootstrapFewShot
  • Prompt extraction and Haystack pipeline rebuilding
  • Complete usage example with document store setup

Best Practices

  • Match retrievers - Use same retriever in DSPy module as Haystack pipeline
  • Custom metrics - Combine Haystack evaluators with DSPy optimization
  • Prompt extraction - Carefully map DSPy demos to Haystack template format
  • Test both - Validate DSPy module AND final Haystack pipeline

Limitations

  • Prompt template conversion can be tricky
  • Some Haystack features don't map directly to DSPy
  • Requires maintaining two codebases initially
  • Complex pipelines may need custom integration

Official Documentation

  • DSPy Documentation: https://dspy.ai/
  • DSPy GitHub: https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy
  • Haystack Documentation: https://docs.haystack.deepset.ai/

How to use it

Copy the folder

Take omidzamani/dspy-haystack-integration from the repository into ~/.claude/skills for personal use, or into .claude/skills inside a project.

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