Break Your Own RAG Pipeline Before Users Do

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems can fail in production due to messy data that standard evaluations often miss. Proactively testing pipelines with an adversarial test set, a practice known as fault injection, can uncover these weaknesses before users encounter them. The content demonstrates four specific failure points: stale documents, OCR errors, query typos, and tables split across page breaks. For each problem, it provides a specific correction, such as recency tie-breaking, text normalization, fuzzy matching, and improved document chunking strategies, while also advocating for evidence checks in testing.