RAG Architecture End to End
The full ingestion and query pipeline for retrieval-augmented generation — where naive RAG plateaus, the concrete fix at every stage, and how to talk about it in a design interview
A deep, standalone treatment of RAG architecture: the offline ingestion path and online query path as one diagram, a named failure mode at every stage, why the 'naive RAG' first pass plateaus at mediocre quality, query rewriting and multi-query fan-out, the confidence gate and the 'I don't know' path, citations and grounding checks, advanced patterns (parent-child, HyDE, agentic retrieval) and when they earn their complexity, and a RAG maturity ladder for the 'how would you improve this system' follow-up.
Practice questions (9)
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Diagnosing 'Plausible but Wrong' Answers
Advanced · Free -
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The Silent Embedding-Model Mismatch
Advanced -
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Designing the Confidence Gate and 'I Don't Know' Path
Advanced -
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Scoping Agentic Retrieval vs Fixing the Basics
Advanced -
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Auditing a Citation System That 'Already Has Citations'
Advanced