RAG in Practice — Read from the beginning

A practical, production-oriented guide to retrieval-augmented generation — from why AI models fail with live data to the decisions that make RAG systems actually work.

The Series

Part 1: Why AI Gets Things Wrong
Frozen knowledge, no live system access, and why fine-tuning doesn't fix the knowledge currency problem.

Part 2: What RAG Is and Why It Works
RAG as a pattern — retrieve first, then generate. The six components and the line between knowledge and reasoning.

Part 3: How RAG Works — The Complete Pipeline
The full RAG pipeline step by step — ingestion, chunking, embedding, retrieval, augmentation, and generation.

Part 4: Chunking, Retrieval, and the Decisions That Break RAG
Chunking, retrieval, and reranking — the decisions that separate demos from production systems.

Part 5: Build a RAG System in Practice
What happens when a simple RAG pipeline meets real documents — four document shapes, four failure modes, and the decisions each one teaches.

Part 6: RAG, Fine-Tuning, or Long Context?
When to reach for RAG, when to fine-tune, when to lean on long context — and when to combine them.

Part 7: Your RAG System Is Wrong. Here's How to Find Out Why.
Evaluation, faithfulness, and the diagnostic discipline that separates working RAG from broken RAG.

Part 8: RAG in Production — What Breaks After Launch
Data freshness, embedding drift, security, caching, observability, and the patterns that come after the baseline. The production close to the series.

Series complete — 8 parts. Each part is independently readable but builds on the previous. Read Part 1 first if you're new to RAG; jump to any part if you have a specific question.