Found but Unusable: The Recoverable Chunk Problem

Retrieval systems are usually evaluated on whether they can find the right source. In practice, finding is necessary but not sufficient. A retriever can surface exactly the correct document and still leave the downstream agent unable to act, because the fragment it returns is not usable on its own.

The gap between found and usable

A chunk can be relevant yet unusable when it has lost the context that made it meaningful — the definition three paragraphs up, the table header two pages back, the qualifying clause that was split across a boundary. The agent receives a fragment that looks authoritative and reasons confidently from incomplete ground.

Recoverable provenance

The substrate's job is not only to retrieve, but to keep the recovered material recoverable: able to be re-expanded to the context required for a specific task, with provenance intact. This reframes retrieval quality as a property of the whole pipeline, not a single similarity score.

Finding is a search problem. Usability is a substrate problem.

This is a public note; it does not disclose Hunter-RAG's implementation details.