How RAG Works: The Complete Pipeline

Part 3 of 8 - RAG Article Series Previous: What RAG Is: The Pattern That Grounds AI in Reality (Part 2) Two Shifts, Two Jobs Part 2 showed the RAG pattern as six components in a line: query in, context retrieved, answer out. That is the shape of the system. This article shows how it actually runs. For a single document, you can paste it into a chat window and ask questions directly. RAG exists because companies have hundreds of documents that change weekly, and the answer to a real question may depend on several of them. A RAG pipeline is not one flow. Shift 1 is ingestion.