Common Pitfalls in RAG Applications: What to Avoid When Using Vector Search and Embeddings
Here's the demo that always works: you point a notebook at a vector index, ask it a question, and it answers perfectly. Everyone claps. Three weeks later, the same system tells a customer that your refund window is 90 days when it's 30, cites a document that doesn't exist, and occasionally surfaces another tenant's invoice in the context. Nobody clapped for that part. RAG is deceptively easy to stand up and genuinely hard to keep honest. The retrieval step looks like a solved problem — embed the
