A field note on why your RAG app doesn't have a model problem — it has a retrieval problem. Built on a 346-page scanned Kannada novel: OCR, hybrid retrieval, reranking, deterministic routing — and the numbers that proved it worked. The moment I stopped trusting my own system was the moment it confidently answered a question about page 120 with a passage from an entirely different chapter. I was building a RAG agent for Heli Hogu Kaarana , a Kannada novel by Ravi Belagere, digitize...