Learn the controls and knobs

Primary knobs for chunking: target tokens, overlap, heading-aware split, table/list handlers, metadata fields, dedupe near-duplicates.

Write a sheet for the employee handbook assistant with columns: control, current value, predicted benefit, predicted cost, rollback trigger. Fill it using this topic’s real tension: Small chunks retrieve precisely but lose context; large chunks preserve context but dilute matches. Overlap helps boundary cases and duplicates hits.

Change one chunking family at a time. If you move two knobs and the employee handbook assistant improves, you learned a cocktail, not a cause—and you cannot roll back surgically.

End users of the employee handbook assistant should see only safe dials related to chunking. Infrastructure limits, private prompts, and policy thresholds stay server-owned. A user-facing control that bypasses those limits is a vulnerability dressed as UX for chunking.

Publish the chunking control sheet next to the employee handbook assistant runbook. On-call should see which knob moved in the last deploy without reading chat archaeology. Unknown chunking knobs are unowned knobs.

Also pin one numeric memory from this chunking chapter: If exceptions live 120 tokens after a rule and chunks are 80 tokens with no overlap, retrieval can return the rule without the exception—measurable as citation-support failures. That number is not decoration; it is a template for how claims about chunking on the employee handbook assistant should look in design docs. Scoped specifically to chunking / employee handbook assistant / controls-and-knobs.

People confuse chunking with neighboring buzzwords when debugging the employee handbook assistant. Before changing prompts, ask whether the broken stage was evidence gathering, the chunking judgment itself, validation, or the product action. Fixing the wrong stage creates folklore (“we tried chunking and it failed”) that blocks the next team on the employee handbook assistant. Scoped specifically to chunking / employee handbook assistant / controls-and-knobs.

Write a five-line artifact for this page: goal, inputs, check, owner, stop rule. Invent one fluent failure that the check would catch. Keep details specific to chunking for rag rather than generic AI advice.

Write a five-line artifact for this page: goal, inputs, check, owner, stop rule. Invent one fluent failure that the check would catch. Keep details specific to chunking for rag rather than generic AI advice.

Write a five-line artifact for this page: goal, inputs, check, owner, stop rule. Invent one fluent failure that the check would catch. Keep details specific to chunking for rag rather than generic AI advice.