RAG Architect

Design from measured retrieval failures, not from a fashionable vector database or chunk size.

Start With the Product Contract

Define:

• users and authorization boundary
• answerable and unanswerable question classes
• source corpus, languages, formats, and update rate
• freshness and deletion requirements
• latency, cost, availability, and data-residency constraints
• citation and audit requirements
• acceptable abstention and false-answer rates

Do not build RAG when direct context, structured queries, a conventional search index, or a deterministic API is simpler and more reliable.