I Deployed My RAG System to Production — 7 Things That Failed in First Week

Three months building a bulletproof RAG system, six hours in production before disaster struck — here are the 7 failures that taught me what “production-ready” actually means, with the exact fixes that saved my job.

CodeOrbit

15 min read

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Nov 11, 2025

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I spent three months building a bulletproof RAG system. 100,000 documents indexed.
Sub-second query times. Beautiful architecture. I even wrote about it.

Then I clicked “deploy to production.”

Six hours later, I was Googling “how to undo a production deployment” while my
phone buzzed with angry messages. By midnight, I’d learned more about what “production-ready”
actually means than my entire CS degree taught me.

Spoiler: My code was perfect. My assumptions were catastrophically wrong.

Here are the 7 catastrophic failures that taught me more in 7 days than 3 months of development ever could — with the exact fixes that saved my job.

Failure #1: Production Queries Were From Another Planet