A RAG prototype takes an afternoon. Chunk some documents, embed them, stuff the top matches into a prompt, ship a chat box. It works. You demo it, everyone is impressed, the project gets funded.
Then you point the same code at the real drive and it starts lying with total confidence.
I build AI voice agents and intake systems for a living, which means I build knowledge bases whether the client calls them that or not. An agent that answers a real caller is a knowledge base with a phone attached, and it fails in exactly the same places. My honest position now is that the model is the least interesting part of the build. Every project I have seen stall has stalled on four things, none of them the model.
The demo works because someone picked the documents
That is the whole trick, and nobody says it out loud.
