[ placeholder content ] — shipped with the site so the editorial layout can be reviewed. Not a published note.
Retrieval tutorials start at chunking. Real retrieval starts about four steps earlier, at a question nobody enjoys: what counts as a document?
A 400-page policy PDF is not a document. It is roughly ninety documents that happen to share a cover page, and treating it as one is why your top result is a table of contents.
The week it costs
You find out at the demo. Someone asks a specific question, the system returns something adjacent and confident, and the room quietly stops believing the rest of what you built.
The fix is not a better embedding model. It is a boring afternoon spent deciding what a retrievable unit is for this corpus, and a second boring afternoon writing the splitter that produces it.
Placeholder note shipped with the site so the editorial layout can be reviewed with realistic text. Replace before launch.