Semantic Retrieval for Internal Engineering Docs — A Cost-Aware Evaluation Design
python
dev.to
For internal engineering documentation, use a staged retrieval design with explicit collections, bounded queries, and traceable source context; validate it with a small labeled evaluation set before choosing a larger index. The deciding constraint is effective cost at scale: a fast embedding query is still expensive if it returns twenty irrelevant chunks and forces a large generation prompt. I build customer-support search flows, so “no useful context” is a concrete failure: a support engineer