"Common causes of quality drift:
- (1)Data drift — the knowledge base hasn't been updated. New products, pricing changes, policy updates aren't in the RAG corpus. Fix: automated re-indexing pipeline.
- (2)Usage pattern drift — users are asking questions the agent wasn't designed for. Fix: classify query types, track 'out-of-scope' rate.
- (3)Model version change — the provider silently updated the model. Fix: pin model versions, run golden set on every version change.
- (4)Prompt injection at scale — users found ways to jailbreak. Fix: review flagged outputs. Debug process: run the golden set from week 1 — if it still passes, the issue is data/usage drift, not model quality."