Senior interview question
When is RAG the wrong tool?
Model answer
When the knowledge fits comfortably in the prompt and rarely changes, a retriever adds work without adding much. When the answer must be computed, like a sum over a sales table, text search can't find it: use SQL. And when failures are about format or behaviour rather than missing facts, retrieval won't fix them.
Long contexts don't make RAG obsolete, though: data outgrows windows, and long contexts aren't always used well.
Practise the rest
6 RAG basics questions, 492 in all, each with a model answer. Free.
More RAG basics interview questions
- What is retrieval-augmented generation?
- Your knowledge base is 150,000 tokens. Do you need RAG?
- Which changes force you to re-index, and which don't?
- Retrieval finds the right passage 70% of the time. Is a better generator or better retrieval worth more?
- How would you decide where a question should be answered from in a RAG system?