You're doing RAG wrong

Short summary

RAG pipelines fail because text chunks lack idea boundaries, version awareness, and governance metadata, causing retrieval failures and control issues. Question-answer packets—embedding questions paired with validated answers as atomic units—reduce retrieval distance by 2.29x and improve accuracy by 13.55%. A preprocessing pipeline with semantic deduplication enables structural matching and prevents redundant vectors from degrading retrieval signal.

• •Chunks are structurally neutral, causing retrieval failures and governance issues
• •Question-answer packets create atomic units that match queries structurally, not semantically
• •7-stage preprocessing pipeline with deduplication outperforms naive chunking by 13.55%

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.