RAG in Plain English

Retrieval-augmented generation is how you get an AI to answer from your documents instead of its memory. The idea, the moving parts, and why it goes wrong.

1. Give the AI Your Documents Why a plain chatbot can't answer from your private or current files, and what retrieval changes about that.
2. How It Works The four-step pipeline: split documents into chunks, turn them into searchable vectors, retrieve the relevant ones, and hand them to the model to answer.
3. Why It Goes Wrong The four common failure modes - bad chunking, stale data, wrong-passage retrieval, and ungrounded answers - and how to catch each one.