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Retrieval & EmbeddingsHard· Latency· Scaling· System design

Corpus is about to grow 10×. One engineer wants to wide...

Widening k on a flat index will cause latency to regress, and building a full three-stage funnel (reclustering and validation) is too time-consuming for a single sprint. The most pragmatic solution is to add a sparse pre-filter to the existing dense stage, which reduces the number of items the dense stage must process, thereby maintaining recall without exceeding the latency budget.

Code playground (Python)