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Retrieval
Chunking
Splitting documents into pieces small enough to embed and retrieve.
Embeddings have a token limit (typically 512-8k), so source documents have to be split into chunks before indexing. Naive chunking (every N characters) destroys meaning at the boundaries. Document-aware chunking respects natural structure — paragraphs, sections, code blocks, table rows — and preserves enough context that a retrieved chunk makes sense in isolation. Most RAG quality problems are chunking problems in disguise.
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