Why You Can't Debug RAG Without Separating Retrieval from Generation

Description

RAG systems fail in two fundamentally different ways, and conflating them is why most debugging efforts go nowhere. Most teams jump straight to tweaking prompts or swapping models without diagnosing which component is actually failing. If your retrieval is broken, better prompts won't help. If your generation is broken, fancier vector databases won't either. The diagnostic step: error analysis. Review failing cases and identify whether the problem is "wrong context retrieved" (retrieval failure) or "right context, wrong response" (generation failure). This determines whether you optimize your search pipeline or your LLM pipeline. Treating RAG as a single system obscures where to focus improvement efforts. Decompose the problem first, then apply the right evaluation methodology to each piece. #RAG #LLMEvaluation #AIEngineering #InformationRetrieval #AIProductDevelopment #LLMOps