Vector Search at Scale: Why Your Index Isn't as Healthy as You Think

Vector search has become load-bearing infrastructure in modern AI systems remarkably fast. A year or two ago, it was primarily a research curiosity and a niche tool for semantic search. Today it sits at the center of RAG pipelines, recommendation engines, multimodal retrieval systems, and a growing class of applications that reason over unstructured data. The operational patterns haven't kept pace with the adoption.