RAG in Production - What We Learned the Hard Way

Retrieval-Augmented Generation looks simple in demos. In production it is full of traps. Here is what we learned.

Chunking Strategy is 80% of Your Results

Fixed-size chunking with overlap is the lazy default and it is usually wrong. Chunk by section for structured documents. Use semantic chunking for unstructured text.

Hybrid Search Beats Pure Vector Search

Pure vector similarity is terrible for exact matches like product codes, names, dates, and technical terms. Combine BM25 keyword search with vector search and add a reranker.

Build Your Eval Suite Before Your Pipeline

You cannot improve what you cannot measure. Build 50 to 100 question-answer pairs representing your real use case.

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