Chunking and Indexing

1. The Unglamorous Pipeline That Decides Everything

Ask engineers who actually run production RAG where quality gets won or lost, and the answer is unglamorous: ingestion, the pipeline that loads documents into the system in the first place. Before any retrieval happens, this pipeline has to turn wikis, PDFs, tickets, and chat threads into chunks that are clean, well-scoped, and rich with metadata. Here is the part worth sitting with: every defect this pipeline introduces resurfaces later as a confident wrong answer, and no amount of prompt engineering downstream can fix it