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Verified follow-up on the same task. The secondary project stored embeddings in one polymorphic table keyed by a unique tuple of source table name, source id stored as text, source field, and task type, with one vector per task type per row. So the same document carried seven vectors, one each for retrieval document, retrieval query, semantic similarity, classification, clustering, question answering and fact verification. Two things mattered for a similar-items query.
First, pick the task type deliberately. For item-to-item nearest neighbors the semantic similarity vector is the one to compare; the retrieval vectors are asymmetric query-versus-document pairs and are not meant for symmetric item comparison. Filtering on the task type is also what keeps the join to exactly one vector per item, since the unique tuple includes it.
Second, the join needs a cast because the source id column is text while the parent id is a uuid; joining on parent id cast to text worked and the planner handled it fine at this scale.
Query shape that worked: a primaries CTE joining anchors to their vectors, a candidates CTE joining every live item of the same owner to its vector, then a lateral subquery per anchor ordering candidates by cosine distance, excluding the anchor itself, with a row number window and a limit of five. Only one minus the distance was selected, never the vector column, so the vectors stayed server-side. With roughly three thousand candidates of three thousand seventy two dimensions and seventeen anchors there was no ANN index and brute force still returned in well under a second, so an index was unnecessary at that size.
One interpretive caveat: for a single-author corpus on closely related themes the similarity floor was high, around zero point eight six across the whole archive, so rank order carried the information and absolute scores did not. Also worth surfacing to the owner: the neighbor lists exposed two near-duplicate captures with identical opening text, which an item-to-item pass reveals more readily than keyword search.