Chunking Strategy Advisor

Purpose

Recommend document chunking strategy: chunk size, overlap, boundaries, and metadata preservation for optimal retrieval quality.

Input: Document types, sample content (optional), query patterns, RAG architecture
Output: Chunking specification with parameters, boundary rules, and eval recommendations Examples: See examples.md for worked input/output.

Workflow

Step 1: Analyze document characteristics

Types: prose, technical docs, code, tables, FAQs, legal, chat logs.

Step 2: Select chunking method

Step 3: Define parameters

Step 4: Define boundary rules

• Respect section headers / code blocks / table rows
• Do not split mid-sentence
• Preserve metadata: source, page, section title

Step 5: Recommend eval approach

• Sample 20 chunks for manual review
• Retrieval recall@k on golden queries
• A/B chunk sizes if uncertain

Step 6: Validate

Run Validation checklist.

Decision Rules

Validation

• Document types analyzed
• Chunking method selected per type with rationale
• Size and overlap parameters specified
• Boundary rules documented
• Metadata preservation defined
• Eval approach recommended
• Parameters tied to embedding model context if known

Anti-patterns

• One size fits all — same chunk size for code and prose.
• Zero overlap — losing context at boundaries.
• Mid-sentence splits — hurting semantic coherence.
• No metadata — chunks without source attribution.
• Tiny chunks — fragments without context.

Best Practices

• Start 256–512 tokens for prose; tune with eval.
• 10–20% overlap for continuity.
• Use header-aware splitting for documentation.
• Store parent document ID and section path in metadata.
• Re-chunk when switching embedding models.

Output Structure

# Chunking Strategy: [Corpus Name]

## Document Analysis
| Type | Count | Method |
|------|-------|--------|

## Parameters
| Parameter | Value | Rationale |
|-----------|-------|-----------|

## Boundary Rules
1. [Rule]

## Metadata Schema
| Field | Source |
|-------|--------|

## Eval Plan
[Approach]

## Tuning Notes
[When to revisit]

Next Skills