The RAG and Agents Debugging Cheat Sheet

RAG and agents fail in a small number of repeatable ways: poor chunking, irrelevant retrieval, hallucination, agent loops, runaway cost. This cheat sheet is the symptom to fix table a stuck builder keeps open in another tab. Find the symptom you are seeing, suspect the layer at fault, apply the first fix to try, then re run your evals. Covers RAG and agents separately, plus the chunking rule of thumb and why you need observability to debug any of it. Stop tweaking at random.