Stop Building RAG Pipelines Like It's a Hackathon

A weekend RAG demo can look impressive. A production RAG platform for a regulated environment is a different game entirely. The gap is rarely the LLM. It is data engineering, governance, and operational rigor.

What Hackathon RAG Ignores

Most quick prototypes skip critical parts of the pipeline, such as:

• Reliable ingestion with change data capture (CDC)
• Data cleaning, deduplication, and chunking strategy
• PII handling, redaction, and access control
• Evaluation and drift monitoring
• Cost, latency, and SLA constraints

The Production Checklist

If your RAG stack is going into production, you need:

1. A governed data pipeline with quality checks.
2. Security by design (PII, secrets, permissions).
3. Retrieval evaluation and regression testing.
4. Observability on query quality and user feedback loops.
5. Clear ownership and operational runbooks.

RAG is not a hackathon project. It is a data product.

Read the LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7422639715834744833/