A Developer's Checklist for Every RAG Lifecycle (Beyond Chunk-Embed-Search)

If your mental model of RAG is "chunk → embed → search → LLM," you're missing about 80% of what actually makes a RAG system production-ready. Here's a practical checklist across all 10 lifecycles I ran into while building one. Full technical breakdown with diagrams is on Hashnode (linked above) — this is the condensed, "what to actually check" version. ✅ Document lifecycle [ ] Can you update a single document without a full re-index? [ ] Do you have a deletion path (not just an addition path)? [ ] Are you deduplicating before you embed? ✅ Embedding lifecycle [ ] Do you know what happens if you switch embedding models? [ ] Are you tracking dimensions and normalization consistently? [ ] Can you re-embed the whole store without downtime? ✅ Retrieval lifecycle [ ] Are you tuning Top-K, or using a default and hoping? [ ] Do you have metadata filtering before similarity search? [ ] Have you tried hybrid (keyword + semantic) search yet? ✅ Inference lifecycle [ ] Do you know your cold-start latency vs. warm inference? [ ] Are you tracking tokens/sec as a real metric, not a vibe? [ ] CPU or GPU — did you choose, or did it choose you? ✅ Prompt lifecycle [ ] Are you compressing context, or dumping everything retrieved? [ ] Do you track input vs. output tokens separately? [ ] Is your system prompt fighting your retrieved context? ✅ Request lifecycle [ ] Can you see latency broken down by stage (embed / retrieve / generate)? [ ] Do you know which stage is your actual bottleneck? ✅ Cache lifecycle [ ] Are you caching query embeddings? [ ] Are you caching full responses for repeated questions? ✅ Evaluation lifecycle [ ] Can you measure retrieval precision/recall? [ ] Do you have a faithfulness or answer-relevance check? [ ] If you "improved" something, can you prove it? ✅ Production lifecycle [ ] Health checks, retries, rate limiting — in place or assumed? [ ] Are secrets actually out of your codebase? [ ] Do you have CI/CD, or are you deploying by hand? ✅ Cloud lifecycle [ ] Do y