retoorandClaude Sonnet 5
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- Plexer: always-active terminal multiplexing. NativePlexerController/ TmuxPlexerController share one interface, chosen by which env var is already set (TAI_PLEXER_SOCKET vs TMUX_PANE); NativePlexerBackend is the pty.fork()-based wrapper (raw mode, SIGWINCH resize forwarding, a Unix-socket control protocol, continuous session logging, a Ctrl+A prefix key distinct from tmux's own Ctrl+B). Auto-wraps new interactive shells via a .bashrc hook mirroring the existing command-not-found install pattern, gated on $TMUX/$TAI_PLEXER_ACTIVE/ a $HOME/.tai-no-plexer bypass. New plexer_send/read/type/status tools, env-gated on a detected controller. - tests/container.py + docker-compose.yml + tests/docker/Dockerfile: a disposable podman/docker image for the tests that must never touch a real machine (installing the plexer hook into a real ~/.bashrc, a live tmux session). Required suite (test_seal.py, test_tai.py, tests/plexer.py, tests/bashrc.py) gates the result; tests/rag.py runs as best-effort since its real-LLM dependency can't be satisfied inside a disposable container with no nested engine. - tests/bashrc.py: real end-to-end hook install + bash -i auto-wrap, anti-recursion, tmux-active skip, non-interactive skip, a live TmuxPlexerController test, and an install/uninstall round-trip. - tests/plexer.py: NativePlexerBackend under a real pty, plus a dedicated robustness pass (file permissions, >64KB payload framing, a malformed control request, a genuine self-deadlock fix in the write-to-child path). - tai_test.py: the shared async process-driving framework (pipe/pty transport, group-wide kill-and-reap, a StdinBridge for --interactive) both test files build on. - ChatClient last-resort backend: when there's no local opencode CLI but the sandbox box is already running, install opencode into it (official Node tarball, not apt -- apt's nodejs/npm pull in webpack/babel/jest as transitive deps) and route through it instead of giving up. Only reachable after the first retry round already failed everything else; never creates the box itself. TmuxPlexerController.status() fixed to use `list-panes` instead of `display-message -p`, which silently fell back to the default pane instead of erroring against a dead target. - Fix 4 pre-existing test_tai.py bugs surfaced by running it in a clean environment for the first time: two stale mock signatures (subprocess.run's stdout= kwarg, Chat.complete's deadline= kwarg), one $TMUX-dependent catalog assertion, one tty-dependent color assertion. - research/: a sourced research archive (Source Dossier/Citation Card/Conclusion tiers) backing the above design decisions, with its own audit.py consistency checker. - .gitignore: fix a blanket *.md rule that was about to silently drop the entire research/ archive from version control; add __pycache__/ and the one-off debug transcript this session started from. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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A Practical Guide to Chunking Strategies in RAG Systems
Metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Institute | Molodetz Institute — Research & Retrieval Division |
| Subject | sqlite-rag-hybrid-search |
| Document type | Source Dossier |
| Tier | 1 |
| Source title | A Practical Guide to Chunking Strategies in RAG Systems |
| Source URL | https://www.cloudthat.com/resources/blog/a-practical-guide-to-chunking-strategies-in-rag-systems |
| Source publisher / author | CloudThat (vendor blog) |
| Source type | blog post |
| Source date (published) | Unknown — not stated |
| Date researched | 2026-10-09 |
| Researched by | tai (agent), model: Claude Sonnet 5, on behalf of retoor |
| Research method | web search synthesis |
| Confidence | Medium |
| Status | Active |
Summary
A practitioner-oriented guide recommending a "define goals, pick a strategy, measure, iterate" workflow for RAG chunking, with a concrete overlap-size recommendation (20-50% of chunk size) and an explicit warning that changing chunking strategy later requires reindexing the entire knowledge base from scratch.
Key findings
- Recommends chunk overlap in the 20-50% range as a starting point, trading some content duplication for reduced risk of splitting an answer across a chunk boundary.
- States plainly that overlap increases redundancy and processing cost — it is presented as a tradeoff, not a free win.
- Flags that chunking-strategy changes are expensive after the fact: the entire corpus needs reindexing, which argues for picking a reasonable default deliberately rather than treating it as trivially changeable later.
- Recommends a measure-then-iterate workflow (test real queries against retrieval quality) rather than picking a chunk size by intuition alone.
Pros / strengths
- Gives an actual numeric starting range for overlap (20-50%) rather than vague guidance, which is directly usable as a design input.
- The "reindexing is costly" warning is operationally important and often omitted by other chunking-strategy writeups.
Cons / limitations / caveats
- The 20-50% overlap range is presented as general practitioner guidance, not derived from a controlled experiment in this source; it should be treated as a reasonable starting point, not a proven optimum.
- No chunking-strategy guidance specific to command-line/terminal-log text was found in this source — it is written for general document/knowledge-base RAG.
Relevance to tai
The overlap-size guidance directly shaped tai's chunk_lines() design, though tai ultimately chose a smaller, line-count-based overlap (3 lines) rather than a 20-50% character-based overlap, judged a better fit for line-oriented terminal/log content where whole-line boundaries matter more than character-percentage boundaries. The "reindexing is costly" warning was a factor in deciding to commit to one chunking function used everywhere (chunk_lines()) rather than letting each feature invent its own chunking rule. See conclusions/no-vectors-bm25-chunked-rag.md.
Changelog
| Date | Change |
|---|---|
| 2026-10-09 | Initial dossier created. |