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?

#RAG#LLM#Evaluation

Core Summary

In RAG, generation quality is capped by retrieval quality — if the right chunk never reaches the context window, no prompt can save you. Debug by measuring retrieval and generation separately, because they fail for completely different reasons and only one of them is usually broken.

Hints

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