Treat retrieval, not generation, as your RAG failure point — it breaks 73% of the time

Future AGI·medium signal

2026 production analysis attributes 73% of RAG failures to the retrieval step rather than the LLM's generation, which reframes where debugging effort should go. Wrap retrieval in an agentic loop that decides when to retrieve, rewrites the query between hops, and switches tools (vector, BM25, web, SQL) instead of trusting a single one-shot fetch.