Chunking and Indexing

1. The Ingestion Pipeline Decides Everything

Ask engineers who actually run production RAG where quality is won or lost, and the answer is not exciting: 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 remembering: every defect this pipeline introduces appears later as a confident wrong answer, and no amount of prompt engineering downstream can fix it