How to Build a Regression Gate for Production RAG Systems
A team builds a retrieval-augmented chatbot over the company's internal policy documents. In the demo, someone asks "how many days of parental leave do we get?" and the bot answers correctly, citing the right PDF. Someone asks about expense limits - correct again. Ten questions, ten good answers, applause, ship it.
Three months later an employee asks whether their contractor status qualifies for the health stipend, gets a confident "yes" assembled from a policy that was superseded last year, and files the claim. Nobody on the team can say when the pipeline started producing answers like that, because nothing was ever measuring whether it did.
That is the real state of most RAG systems in production. The pipeline is not unusually inaccurate - every retrieval system misses sometimes. What's missing is the apparatus that would notice. The demo was treated as the evaluation, and a demo is the one...
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