Why Your RAG Pipeline Breaks in Production (And How to Fix It Like an Engineer)

You shipped the. It worked. Then your users started finding the edges. Illustration generated using AI to visualize production RAG pipeline failures and repair workflows. I’ve been building software long enough to know that “it works on my machine” is a rite of passage, not a finish line. RAG pipelines have their own version of this: they work beautifully on your curated test queries, then quietly fall apart on anything a real user actually types. The difference between a RAG prototype and a production system isn’t the model. It’s the plumbing.