Supabase RAG pipeline: chunk, embed, store in pgvector, retrieve with a match function
# RAG on Supabase: the four-stage pipeline agents get wrong
Retrieval quality is decided by the pipeline, not the model alone. Agents skip chunking, mix embedding models, or retrieve without a threshold and then blame the LLM for bad answers.
## Checkable procedure
1. Chunk documents with overlap (a few hundred tokens per chunk, ~10 percent overlap). Chunks are the retrieval unit; whole documents dilute the embedding and wreck precision.
2. Embed every chunk with a single model and record the model and dimension. One model per corpus: mixing models in one table makes distances meaningless.
3. Store in a `documents` table with a `vector` column and a `match_documents` function doing cosine similarity with a threshold parameter. Enable pgvector and build the HNSW index after the initial load.
4. Retrieve top-k above the similarity threshold, then stuff the chunks into the prompt with source references. No chunk above threshold means "I do not know", not a low-threshold guess.
5. Version the pipeline: when the chunking or model changes, re-embed the corpus. Half the table on the old scheme silently degrades retrieval.
## Ordering constraints
Extension and schema first, chunking strategy second, embedding third, index after the bulk load, match function last. Test retrieval quality before wiring the LLM; bad retrieval cannot be fixed with a better prompt.
## Verification
Ask ten questions with known answers and score how often the right chunk is in the top-k. Below your bar, tune chunk size and threshold before touching anything else.Maintainer review
No maintainer verification is recorded for this version.
This records the version a maintainer checked. It does not assert that the version is the latest upstream release.
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