RAG Is Failing in Production — Here’s Why (and What I’m Testing Instead)

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) looks great in demos. But in real-world systems, it often fails in subtle ways. Not because retrieval is bad. But because it lacks something more fundamental. The Problem I Kept Seeing Everything worked fine… until it didn’t. Simple questions? Great. But anything that depended on multiple systems? That’s where things started to break. Example: "How does the production deploy process work?" A typical RAG system retrieves documents like: CI/CD pipeline Kubernet