EDUCATION & TRAINING
A 2026 Chunking Playbook
Dev.to Machine Learning
About This Tutorial
What builders shipping RAG need to know Retrieval, not generation, is the failure point - when a RAG answer is wrong, the relevant passage was missing or buried roughly 73% of the time. Chunking is the highest-ROI lever - it costs nothing extra at query time and decides what the retriever can even find. Start with recursive character splitting at 512 tokens with 50-100 tokens of overlap - the benchmark-validated default for 2026. Reach for semantic chunking selectively - it helps documents with abrupt topic shifts and earns its cost only when structure is uneven.