RAG rollout checklist

Retrieval-augmented workflows fail quietly — answers sound confident while citing stale chunks. Use this checklist before inviting a department to rely on DeepSeek over your document index.

Corpus hygiene

• Remove superseded policy PDFs from the index.
• Tag each source with owner and last-reviewed date.
• Chunk at logical section boundaries, not fixed 512 tokens only.

Answer contract

Require inline citations to chunk IDs. If retrieval score is below threshold, the model must say “not found in corpus” instead of guessing.

Freshness

Schedule weekly re-index jobs and compare answer drift on ten golden questions. Roll back index versions when drift exceeds agreed tolerance.