A Developer's Checklist for Every RAG Lifecycle (Beyond Chunk-Embed-Search)

If your mental model of RAG is "chunk → embed → search → LLM," you're missing about 80% of what actually makes a RAG system production-ready. Here's a practical checklist across all 10 lifecycles I ran into while building one. Full technical breakdown with diagrams is on Hashnode (linked above) — this is the condensed, "what to actually check"...