AI engineering
RAG Chunking for Engineering Documentation
Chunk size, overlap, and metadata strategies that improve retrieval quality for technical content—not marketing copy.
2025-01-15 · 1 min read
Why generic chunking fails
Engineering docs have code blocks, diagrams, and hierarchical headings. Fixed 512-token chunks split functions across boundaries and destroy retrieval precision.
What works better
- Heading-aware splits — never break inside a fenced code block.
- Metadata:
file,section,languageon every chunk. - Overlap of 10–15% for procedural steps that span paragraphs.
Evaluation
Measure recall@k on real questions your team asks—not abstract benchmarks. "How do we run migrations in CI?" is a better test than "What is Prisma?"