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From RAG Prototype to Production

The gap between a RAG demo and a dependable service, and a checklist for closing it.

Editorial team 1 min read

A RAG demo on a handful of documents can be built in an afternoon. A dependable production system takes much more.

What Demos Hide

  • Messy real documents that parse badly.
  • Questions users actually ask, phrased unexpectedly.
  • Permissions, freshness and duplicates.
  • Scale, latency and cost.
  • Edge cases, refusals and abuse.

Production Checklist

  • Authoritative, owned content sources with an update process.
  • Reliable parsing and chunking checked on a sample.
  • Hybrid retrieval with re-ranking, tuned on real questions.
  • Permission-aware retrieval with automated access tests.
  • Grounded answers with citations and clear refusals.
  • An evaluation test set run on every change.
  • Logging, dashboards and feedback capture.
  • Latency and cost within budget at expected volume.
  • Prompt-injection and security review.
  • Incremental indexing with deletion handling.
  • A named owner and a support process.

Launch Gradually

Pilot with a small group, compare against how questions were answered before, and expand as metrics hold.

Budget for Maintenance

Content changes, models update and usage evolves. Plan ongoing time for review, evaluation and improvement — RAG systems degrade without it.

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