Postmortem: why our RAG answers drifted when nobody deployed anything
Over six weeks an internal help assistant got quietly worse with no model or prompt change. The causes were all in the retrieval layer, and all preventable.
Topic · 2 stories
Retrieval and RAG
Chunking, embeddings, indexes and the quiet ways retrieval-augmented answers change over time.
The real cost of long context: a worked example at 40,000 calls a day
Stuffing 120,000 tokens into every request is easy to build and expensive to run. We price it, time it and compare it against a 6,000-token retrieval setup.