Hamel Husain says the biggest RAG failure is vague user intent. Users give unclear prompts expecting the model to guess what they want. He recommends product designers build intent-gathering widgets into the interface to clarify what users actually need before the system retrieves anything.
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think clarifying intent is definitely useful. Every time I encounter a RAG system, one of the top errors is unspecified or not properly specified user intent. People have pretty high expectations, put in a really vague prompt and hope that the language models just like figure it out, but that's not really the case right now. I don't know where we will go from here, if we will always need that, but it definitely is something you should always keep in mind. I think it's wrapped up in the whole UX. If you put your product hat on, you want to pay attention to the user interface. For example, if you're trying to set an appointment, maybe show the user a widget. Same thing here. If you're not gathering user intent, I would kind of put that in like the UX sort of bucket of things, of things you should just like think really carefully
