Your retriever misses the relevant document entirely. How do you debug and fix low recall?
When the right answer isn't even in the top-50, the generator can't rescue you. Low recall has a short list of usual suspects. Here is the order to check them so you fix the cause, not a symptom.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
When the right answer isn't even in the top-50, the generator can't rescue you. Low recall has a short list of usual suspects. Here is the order to check them so you fix the cause, not a symptom.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
