Tagged RAG · show all articles
Retrieval-augmented generation fails quietly. Ten distinct, documented mechanisms, from a stale index to a fabricated citation, account for nearly every expensive production RAG incident, and each has its own detection and its own fix.
A production retrieval system is not one architecture but six coupled engineering decisions — chunking, hybrid weighting, reranking, access control, index freshness, and what gets watched once it is live.
A retrieval layer does not let a model remember. It submits evidence in support of an answer not yet written. Almost every expensive failure in production RAG follows from confusing the two.
An embedding is a filing decision, not a fact about meaning. Its geometry guarantees far less than the systems built on top of it assume, and every surprising retrieval failure follows from that gap.
Codex, Claude Code, RAG, and MCP make more sense when treated as components in a measured feedback system rather than as personalities with tools.