Lesson 3: Retrieval quality is still the main bottleneck

This lesson is a useful reality check. Agentic reasoning cannot compensate for consistently poor retrieval. If the underlying retrieval has inadequate coverage, badly built indexes, or poor integration of structured and unstructured knowledge, no amount of clever agent orchestration will save the answer. The practical order of operations follows: invest in a robust retrieval pipeline and high-quality indexing before you add agentic complexity. Agents amplify good retrieval; they do not replace it. This mirrors the lesson from the agentic memory topic, where retrieval quality was the bottleneck for memory too.