Documents Aren't Bags of Chunks

One thing kept bothering me about retrieval systems: they often destroy the document before trying to understand it. Imagine taking a technical specification and cutting it with scissors every five hundred words. No attention to headings. No respect for sections. No care for where a thought begins and ends. Just cut. Stack. Index. That sounds absurd. Yet this is remarkably close to what many retrieval pipelines do before a document ever reaches a vector database. We're asking the wrong question…