Tagged production systems · show all articles
Retrieval-augmented generation is usually described as one step: ask, then answer. In production it is six separate stages, each with its own literature, its own failure mode, and its own knob to turn.
A practical guide to the decisions that determine whether an application on a frontier model stays correct and affordable as the model underneath it changes without warning.
The dangerous failures are not the ones that throw an exception. They are the ones where the system keeps returning well-formed output that is quietly wrong, and nothing upstream notices.