Retrieval

Finding the right context, and proving that you did.

Level 1

Orientation

What it is, and why it matters.

How do I get a model to answer from my own documents?

A model has never seen your documents, so asking it about them produces fluent, confident invention. The fix is not to teach it — it is to hand it the right passages at the moment you ask, which is the whole idea behind retrieval.

3 min

Level 2

Application

Using it for real work.

Why does recall drop when you make your chunks bigger?

Bigger chunks carry more context, so retrieval should improve. It usually gets worse. The reason is that embedding a long passage averages away the specific thing your query was looking for.

1 min