RAG in production: what actually matters

A RAG demo takes an afternoon. A RAG system you can trust in production takes real engineering - because the failure modes only show up at scale and with real users.

The three things that matter most: retrieval quality, evaluation, and guardrails. If you can't measure retrieval quality, you're flying blind. If you don't have evals, you can't tell whether a change helped or hurt.

Guardrails are what make AI safe to ship. Source attribution, refusal behavior, and human review gates turn an impressive demo into something a business can depend on.

We treat evals as a first-class deliverable, not an afterthought. That's the difference between AI that demos well and AI that works.