The Smart Chunker Did Not Earn Its Keep
TL;DR for operators RAG teams often want to believe that a smarter chunking method will rescue messy document retrieval. It is a tidy belief. It is also the sort of tidy belief that tends to become a budget line. The paper behind this article tests that belief in a small, practical setting: thirteen academic theses, ten questions per thesis, three chunking strategies, and a self-hosted RAG stack constrained by 16 GiB of VRAM.1 The strategies are familiar: fixed-size chunks, recursive format-aware chunks, and cluster-based semantic chunks. The expensive-sounding one, cluster-based semantic chunking, does not consistently win. ...