This came up in Chinese AI developer circles recently: IBM has been promoting something called Chunkless RAG, where inst...

This came up in Chinese AI developer circles recently: IBM has been promoting something called Chunkless RAG, where instead of the standard document-to-chunk-to-embedding pipeline, an AI agent navigates document structure the way a human reader would. Tools like Docling parse PDFs into structured representations, preserving headings, tables, and section hierarchies, and then the agent walks that structure to find relevant content rather than doing cosine similarity on chopped-up text.The pitch is appealing. Anyone who has watched a RAG pipeline confidently return three fragments from the middle of a dense technical spec, all of which are semantically close to the query but structurally meaningless without their surrounding sections, knows that fixed-size chunking is not a solved problem. So on the surface, this sounds like progress.But I think the core claim, that document structure is the real problem chunking destroys, is significantly oversold. The structure argument assumes your do...