RAG EngineeringdebuggingIntermediate

The answer cites sources that do not say what it claims

Symptoms

  • The agent produces confident answers with footnote-style citations like [doc-14].
  • On inspection, doc-14 exists but does not contain the claimed figure; some cited ids do not exist at all.
  • Retrieval quality is good — the right documents are usually in context.
retrieved: [pricing#2, pricing#5, sla#1]  (all relevant, all in context)
answer: "Enterprise SLA guarantees 99.99% uptime [sla#3] with a 15-minute response [sla#9]."
reality: sla#3 and sla#9 were not retrieved; sla#1 says 99.9% uptime and 1-hour response.

Investigate

Inspect areas in any order (0/5 inspected). When you think you know the root cause, commit to it.

Grounding / citation binding
Prompt instructions
Retrieval quality
Chunking
Embeddings