Previous: #01 — When an AI Discards Its Own Search Results
This is a post-mortem on my own system, not someone else's. And here's the uncomfortable part: I knew the books could be enormous — it was written into the project's own goals, in black and white, before a line of code. I just didn't treat that knowledge as a design constraint. I filed it under "handle it later," built for the common case, and let every layer quietly hardcode "the whole thing fits." Then I pointed it at a real 4,000+ chapter web-novel and every feature broke at once. The lesson — that knowing isn't designing — cost me over a month of refactor work, and I'm still paying it down today. I'm writing it down so you can buy it for the price of reading instead.
The short version
I treated chunking — splitting a large input into smaller units — as something you do at the LLM call, right before you hit the context window: get the document, realize it won't fit, slice it into pieces, loop. Problem solved. I doubt I'm the only one who started there — but I'll argue from my own system, not from a statistic I don't have.
It isn't solved. It's deferred, and the interest compounds.
