Why RAG gives wrong answers (and how to fix retrieval failures)

In the previous post, we built a RAG system from scratch. Sixty lines of Python. Six onboarding documents chunked, embedded, and searchable. Two questions asked, two correct answers grounded in the actual policy documents.

It worked great. So obviously, let's break it to learn how to fix it.

And then we go deeper than the video had time for: the full toolkit of chunking and retrieval strategies, and when you'd actually reach for each one.

All the code is in my GitHub repo, in the ep06-rag-failures folder. Each failure and its fix are separate files that change exactly one thing, so the difference is the whole story.

Two ways RAG fails