Why Your RAG Chatbot Looks Great in Week 1 and Hallucinates by Month 2

💡 Week 1 demo → "this is amazing." Month 2 production → "why is it hallucinating?" I've seen this pattern more times than I can count. The team builds a RAG chatbot. It works beautifully on the 20 questions they tested it with. They ship it. Real users show up with real questions. The cracks appear. The model is almost never the problem. The system around it is. After shipping 10+ production RAG systems — handling everything from 100 queries a day to 1,000+ a week at 95% accuracy — I've narrowe