Ask HN: Are we pretending RAG is ready, when it's barely out of demo phase?

11 points by TXTOS 295 days ago | 10 comments

Been watching the RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) wave crash into production for over a year now.

But something keeps bugging me: Most setups still feel like glorified notebooks stitched together with hope and vector search.

Yeah, it "works" — until you actually need it to. Suddenly: irrelevant chunks, hallucinations, shallow query rewriting, no memory loop, and a retrieval stack that breaks if you breathe on it wrong.

We’ve got: • pipelines that don’t align with what users actually want to ask, • retrieval that acts more like a search engine than a reasoning aid, • brittle evals (because "correct context" ≠ "correct answer"), • and no one’s sure where grounding ends and illusion begins.

Sure, you can make it work — if you’re okay duct-taping every component and babysitting the system 24/7.

So I gotta ask: Is RAG just stuck in prototype land pretending to be production? Or has someone here actually built a setup that survives user chaos and edge cases?

Would love to hear what’s worked, what hasn't, and what you had to throw away.

Not pushing anything, just been knee-deep in this and looking to sanity check with folks who’ve actually shipped stuff.

kingkongjaffa 295 days ago |

We have a RAG powered product in production right now used by thousands of users.

RAG is part of the solution, it provides the required style, formatting and subject matter idiosyncrasies of the domain.

But it isn't enough to do (prompt + RAG query on that prompt) alone, we have a handwritten series of prompts, so the user input is just one step in a branching decision tree of deciding which prompts to apply, in sequence (prompt 1 output = prompt 2 input) and also composition (deciding to combine prompt (3 + 5, but not prompt 4)) for example.

TXTOS 295 days ago | |

Totally agree, RAG by itself isn’t enough — especially when users don’t follow the script.

We’ve seen similar pain: one-shot retrieval works great in perfect lab settings, then collapses once you let in real humans asking weird followups like

“do that again but with grandma’s style” and suddenly your context window looks like a Salvador Dali painting.

That branching tree approach you mentioned — composing prompt→prompt→query in a structured cascade — is underrated genius. We ended up building something similar, but layered a semantic engine on top to decide which prompt chain deserves to exist in that moment, not just statically prewiring them.

It’s duct tape + divination right now. But hey — the thing kinda works.

Appreciate your battle-tested insight — makes me feel slightly less insane.

mikert89 294 days ago |

what planet are you on? RAG has been working everywhere for a while

TXTOS 294 days ago | |

haha fair — guess I’ve just been on the planet where the moment someone asks a followup like “can you explain that in simpler terms?”, the whole RAG stack folds like a house of cards.

if it’s been smooth for you, that’s awesome. I’ve just been chasing edge cases where users go off-script, or where prompt alignment + retrieval break in weird semantic corners.

so yeah, maybe it’s a timezone thing

moomoo11 294 days ago |

You’re better off using OS/ES and using AI to help you craft the exact query to run on an index.

TXTOS 294 days ago | |

agree — I’ve used Q/S with AI-assisted query shaping too, especially when domain vocab gets wild. the part I kept bumping into was: even with perfect-looking queries, the retrieved context still lacked semantic intent alignment.

so I started layering reasoning before retrieval — like a semantic router that decides not just what to fetch, but why that logic path even makes sense for this user prompt.

different stack, same headache. appreciate your insight though — it’s a solid route when retrieval infra is strong.

moomoo11 294 days ago | | |

What sort of data are you working with?

In my case, users would be searching through either custom defined data models (I have custom forms and stuff), or if they were trying to find a comment on a Task, or various other attached data on common entities.

For example, "When did Mark say that the field team ran into an issue with the groundwater swelling?"

That would return the Comment, tied to the Task.

In my system there are discussions and comments (common) tied to every data entity (and I'm using graphdb, which makes things exponentially simpler). I index all of these anyway for OS, so the AI is able to construct the query to find this. So I can go from comment -> top level entity or vice versa.

I spent maybe 60-100 hours writing dozens maybe a hundred tests to get the prompt right, taking it from 95% success to 100% success. In over 2 months it hasn't failed yet.

Sorry, I should mention maybe our use-cases are different. I am basically building an audit log.