Four production pitfalls that turn RAG demos into broken chatbots

A common pattern we see: a Series A team builds a RAG assistant, runs a 50-question internal demo, ships to production, and within two weeks the support inbox is full of "the AI gave me a wrong answer" tickets. Nothing changed between Tuesday's demo and Friday's outage. The same model, the same retrieval, the same prompt template. What changed is the question distribution. Internal demos are written by people who already know the corpus. Production users are not. The four failure modes below sh...