RAG Classifications, Architectures: A Field Guide for Production-Grade Systems

If you've shipped a "chat with your docs" prototype in a weekend, congratulations — you've built Naive RAG. If you've then watched it hallucinate on multi-hop questions, choke on tables, and confidently cite the wrong PDF in production... also congratulations. You've discovered why "RAG" is not a single architecture. It's a design space.

This article is the map I wish I had before I rebuilt the same pipeline four times.

TL;DR

Naive RAG (retrieve → stuff context → generate) breaks down fast: bad chunking, semantic drift, no query understanding, no self-correction.

Advanced RAG fixes retrieval quality with pre/post-retrieval optimizations (query rewriting, HyDE, re-ranking).

RAG Classifications, Architectures: A Field Guide for Production-Grade Systems

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