A Developer's Checklist for Every RAG Lifecycle (Beyond Chunk-Embed-Search)

If your mental model of RAG is "chunk → embed → search → LLM," you're missing about 80% of what actually makes a RAG system production-ready.

Here's a practical checklist across all 10 lifecycles I ran into while building one. Full technical breakdown with diagrams is on Hashnode (linked above) — this is the condensed, "what to actually check" version.

[ ] Can you update a single document without a full re-index?

[ ] Do you have a deletion path (not just an addition path)?

[ ] Are you deduplicating before you embed?

A Developer's Checklist for Every RAG Lifecycle (Beyond Chunk-Embed-Search)

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