---
title: "Comment by Ahmet Özel on \"Where RAG Fails: Understanding the Limitations of Retrieval-Augmented Generation\" | Hashnode"
description: "Nice breakdown — parent-child ingestion plus a reranker are exactly the two upgrades that move the needle first. One \"where RAG fails\" case those two don't fix,"
url: "https://hashnode.com/posts/where-rag-fails-understanding-the-limitations-of-retrieval-augmented-generation/6a5d0b1909c5af167ab31f43/comment/6a5f0a495fe50ce983807475"
---

[Discussion](https://hashnode.com/posts/where-rag-fails-understanding-the-limitations-of-retrieval-augmented-generation/6a5d0b1909c5af167ab31f43)

Comment [Where RAG Fails: Understanding the Limitations of Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://hashnode.com/posts/where-rag-fails-understanding-the-limitations-of-retrieval-augmented-generation/6a5d0b1909c5af167ab31f43)

[Ahmet Özel](https://hashnode.com/@ahmetozel)

[Jul 21](https://hashnode.com/posts/where-rag-fails-understanding-the-limitations-of-retrieval-augmented-generation/6a5d0b1909c5af167ab31f43/comment/6a5f0a495fe50ce983807475)

Nice breakdown — parent-child ingestion plus a reranker are exactly the two upgrades that move the needle first.

One "where RAG fails" case those two don't fix, worth adding: when the answer simply isn't in the corpus, the model still confidently stitches one together from the nearest chunks. Precision fixes don't catch that — you need a groundedness check and permission for the system to say "not in the docs."

And on rerank-top-25: the reranker can only reorder what first-stage retrieval already pulled. If recall missed the right chunk, no cross-encoder recovers it — so first-stage recall@k is the real ceiling, and it's worth measuring separately from final answer quality.