Stop building RAG pipelines like it’s 2023

Author(s): AI Rabbit Originally published on Towards AI. Agentic Era If your architecture still looks like “User Query Vector DB LLM,” you aren’t building an AI application; you’re building a hallucination engine. The “naive” RAG era where we just dumped PDFs into Pinecone and prayed for the best is officially over. Here is the technical reality of RAG in 2025.The article discusses the evolution of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, emphasizing the transition from outdated linear architectures to more sophisticated, agentic systems that reason and self-correct. It highlights the importance of new methodologies, including the integration of long-term memory, hybrid retrieval architectures, and advanced production engineering strategies to enhance performance and reliability. The article concludes by asserting that RAG is emerging as a critical engineering discipline, incorporating a variety of advanced technologies and strategies to meet increasing quality standards. Read the full blog for free on Medium. Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming a sponsor. Published via Towards AI