If You Don't Evaluate RAG, You're Guessing

Many teams say: “Our RAG system works.” What they usually mean is: “It answered a few questions correctly.”

That’s not evaluation. That’s optimism.

Where RAG Really Fails

RAG fails in edge cases — always. The real failures appear when:

• Questions are ambiguous.
• Documents conflict with each other.
• Answers require synthesis across chunks.
• Context is incomplete or outdated.

Without evaluation, these failures remain invisible until users lose trust.

What Real Evaluation Looks Like

Evaluation means:

• Running the same queries across configurations.
• Comparing retrieval quality with metrics, not intuition.
• Scoring relevance, not fluency.
• Measuring consistency over time.

It’s not glamorous. But it’s the difference between a demo and a system.

Why This Is Still Rare

Evaluation is hard because:

• Pipelines are opaque and hard to instrument.
• Changes aren’t isolated — everything affects everything.
• Feedback isn’t structured or systematic.

Noesia exists to make evaluation normal, not exceptional.

Guessing is not a strategy.