RAG Tradeoffs I Keep Seeing: fixing retrieval before touching prompts

I spent the day reducing cognitive overhead for engineers and analysts—introducing clearer table contracts, simpler failure modes, and concise runbooks that let teams act faster.

The friction I kept seeing was simple: quality regressions are expensive because they are discovered too late.

Instead of adding more moving parts, I tested an explicit contract for inputs, outputs, and owners.

March for me has been about tightening execution after an idea-heavy February.

What I changed today

• I removed one optional branch that only added maintenance burden.
• I documented one decision that usually lives in hallway conversations.
• I cut one source of rework by tightening upstream validation.

What I want to keep doing

Nothing looked flashy, but the system became easier to reason about under pressure. Most of the win comes from making ownership and boundaries unmistakably clear.

Tomorrow’s focus

Tomorrow I want to tighten the metrics so improvements are obvious without interpretation.

References

• RAG design and evaluation guide
• Azure Well-Architected for AI workloads
• Microsoft Foundry documentation\n\n## Takeaways\n\nAdd a concise, personal takeaway and recommended next steps here.\n