AI Interview DropIntermediate TierScenario+25 XP on read

Your RAG system returns confident but wrong answers. The LLM is fine in isolation. How do you debug the pipeline?

Core Summary

In retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), answer quality is capped by retrieval quality: if the right chunk never reaches the context window, no prompt can save you. Debug retrieval and generation separately, since they fail for different reasons and usually only one of them is actually broken.

Hint 1: Separate retrieval failure from generation failure first

Hint 2: Check whether the correct chunk is even in the index

Hint 3: Chunking strategy causes more failures than embedding model choice

Reported in interviews at OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity

Your RAG system returns confident but wrong answers. The LLM is fine in isolation. How do you debug the pipeline?

Core Summary

Hints