RAG Guardrails That Actually Matter
A minimal checklist to prevent demos from becoming production incidents.
The point
RAG is easy to demo and hard to deploy. Most failures come from missing boundaries, not from retrieval quality.
Minimal guardrails
- Source boundaries (only approved corpora)
- Citation requirements
- Refusal + escalation policy
- PII/PHI handling (redaction + logging discipline)
- Evaluation set (golden Q/A + regression)
Why it works
It forces predictable behavior under uncertainty and makes audits possible.