Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
The "why did it hallucinate" problem every RAG team hits There is a moment every team building retrieval-augmented generation discovers, usually around the third week of production traffic. A user shows you a screenshot. The model has invented a clause. Or quoted a price from a discontinued product. Or apologised for an outage that never happened. You open the logs, and what you see is a single line — response_id=ab12cd, tokens=2,418, latency_ms=1,840. None of which tells you why. The honest answer to the question "why did it hallucinate" almost always lives inside the trace — which chunks were retrieved, what embedding scores they had, what the rewritten query looked like, what the system prompt actually rendered as after templating, which tool returned what, and which model version…
