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hardAI Engineering

What are common RAG failure modes and how do you debug them?

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01

Understand the problem

Retrieval misses, lost-in-the-middle, stale indexes, chunk fragmentation — a triage guide.

ragdebuggingfailure-modesretrieval
02

Attempt it yourself

Sketch your approach before reading the solution — that's what interviews test.

Nudge consolestandby

Stuck? Beam a request up — the console returns a conceptual nudge that guides your logic without spoiling the implementation.

03

Study the solution

Frequent failures: the answer chunk is not retrieved (vocabulary mismatch, bad chunking, wrong k), retrieved but ignored (buried mid-context, conflicting chunks), stale or duplicated index content, and questions that need synthesis across many chunks (retrieval alone cannot). Debug by logging the retrieved set per quer

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04

Read the code

Per-request retrieval logging for triage
const chunks = await retrieve(query, { k: 8 });
const reply = await generate(query, chunks);

await log.rag({
  query,
  retrieved: chunks.map((c) => ({ id: c.id, score: c.score, doc: c.docId })),
  answer: reply.text,
  feedback: null,               // filled by thumbs up/down later
});
// weekly: cluster thumbs-down rows by "gold chunk retrieved?" → fix the bigger pile
05

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