Disclosure: I am a frontend developer transitioning into AI engineering, sharing real experiments and learnings from building production-style RAG systems.
Your RAG pipeline works perfectly on Friday. Then Monday hits. 1,000 users query at once. Suddenly everything breaks: 502 errors, ECONNRESET, OpenAI 429 rate limits, Pinecone timeouts. The demo wasn't wrong—it just wasn't built for production concurrency.
The Monday morning problem
Locally: chunk docs → embed → upsert to Pinecone → query → LLM. Simple.
Under load: socket exhaustion, connection pool saturation, API 429s, token costs exploding.
