Evaluate the RAG using a small labelled question set before adding complexity.
For each question, record expected source, actual top-k sources, answer support,
citation accuracy, correct abstention, latency and current model/index version.
Include paraphrases, an unanswerable question, a private-document request and
an untrusted document containing instructions. Separate retrieval defects from
generation defects. Do not call a lexical TF-IDF vector a learned embedding.
Propose one measurable improvement and rerun the same evaluation set.
