precision

RAG failures are usually retrieval failures, yet most teams only measure the final answer. The signal is scoring retrieval on its own (recall@k, precision@k, MRR/nDCG) to isolate exactly where the system breaks.

A 0.87 cosine score on a chunk that answers nothing is not a bug in your vector database. It is the embedding model telling you exactly what it was trained to tell you. Here is how to read that signal instead of thresholding it away.