Tagged retrieval · show all articles
A production retrieval system is not one architecture but six coupled engineering decisions — chunking, hybrid weighting, reranking, access control, index freshness, and what gets watched once it is live.
A retrieval layer does not let a model remember. It submits evidence in support of an answer not yet written. Almost every expensive failure in production RAG follows from confusing the two.
An embedding is a filing decision, not a fact about meaning. Its geometry guarantees far less than the systems built on top of it assume, and every surprising retrieval failure follows from that gap.