Five Levels of RAG, and the Failure That Ends Each One.
The demo was the easy part. Five failure modes that changed how I built the system.
Start with a failure.
Post-mortem analysis for AI architects building agentic systems. Each one follows a real failure from an enterprise agentic RAG platform, from the first symptom to the architecture decision.
What to look forThe evidence,
The evidence,
then the decision.
Every post-mortem starts with the traces: what the system actually did. From there I follow the evidence to the root cause, show why monitoring missed it, and explain the fix and the choice behind it.
The archive is open-ended, and each piece stands on its own.
- 01 / Evidence
What did the system do?
Reconstructed from the traces, not from memory.
- 02 / Cause
What does it prove?
The root cause, and what the evidence cannot show.
- 03 / Decision
What is safe to change?
The fix, the alternatives I rejected, and how I checked.
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Your Agent Answered. Did It Do the Job?
A fluent answer, a tidy References section, and four links that did not exist.
The Document Loaded. The Meaning Didn't.
Every ingestion check passed. The answers still mixed up two vendors' instructions.
Reason for OutagePost-mortems for
Post-mortems for
AI architects.
A post-mortem is a write-up of what went wrong and what changed. New ones land in your inbox, written to be read in five minutes.
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