RAG Source Boundary Checklist
A builder checklist for retrieval systems: corpus scope, freshness, citations, refusal cases, and when the answer needs a human handoff.
Rules for deciding what retrieved documents may answer, cite, refuse, or escalate.
The Boundary
Define which documents the system can use, how it chunks them, how it ranks conflicting sources, what counts as fresh, and when it must refuse or hand off to a person.
- corpus scope
- source rank
- freshness
- citation contract
- refusal
- human handoff
Good Failure Cases
Test with missing documents, conflicting sources, stale policy pages, duplicated paragraphs, hostile retrieved text, and questions that ask for decisions outside the system boundary.
A RAG demo that only answers happy-path questions is a search box wearing a blazer.