6-4 Production RAG From It Kinda Works to Ship It Hands-On

You have come a long way. You understand what LLMs are. You can run them locally with Ollama. You can customize them with prompts and Modelfiles, and you understand embeddings and vector search at a working level. The mini-RAG we built at the end of the last lecture is a real, functioning thing. And it is also a toy. The gap between that toy and what you would actually ship to production is the topic of the next fifteen minutes. We are going to look at five stages of a production RAG pipeline, the failure modes at each stage, and the techniques that separate engineers who shipped one demo from engineers who run real systems. By the end you will have a complete mental model of production RAG, and a plan for the capstone where you build one.