Bubble Trouble: Why Top‑K Retrieval Keeps Letting LLMs Down
Opening — Why this matters now Enterprise teams didn’t adopt RAG to win leaderboard benchmarks. They adopted it to answer boring, expensive questions buried inside spreadsheets, PDFs, and contracts—accurly, repeatably, and with citations they can defend. That’s where things quietly break. Top‑K retrieval looks competent in demos, then collapses in production. The model sees plenty of text, yet still misses conditional clauses, material constraints, or secondary scope definitions. The failure mode isn’t hallucination in the usual sense. It’s something more procedural: the right information exists, but it never makes it into the context window in the first place. ...