Building RAG in Laravel: Four Ingestion Bugs That Silently Wreck Retrieval

Every Laravel RAG tutorial builds the same ingestion pipeline (chunk, embed, store) and stops the moment the agent answers on screen. None of them check whether retrieval is any good. But retrieval quality is decided at ingestion, before the model runs once, and four decisions there fail with no error, no exception, no failed test: Chunking that severs the answer mid-sentence, so answer@1 falls while source hit@1 still looks healthy. An HNSW index built with vector_l2_ops while you query with…