MCP with Claude

What RAG is and when to use it instead of a long prompt, the offline and online pipelines, what Claude receives as cited sources, and five numbered gates that locate the stage which lost a wrong answer.

Turn files into clean, typed elements with provenance: choose a parser tier per file, keep tables as structure, clean without deleting content, dedupe without dropping new versions, and gate the output.

Choose what to cut on, size chunks in the embedder's own tokens, keep headings, tables and code whole, search small but return big, and measure any change with recall@k on real questions.

How a vector index stores and searches embeddings: the index as a rebuildable copy, how HNSW finds neighbours and what ef_search changes, RAM arithmetic, and choosing a store from constraints.