Five RAG chunking strategies with runnable Python examples

A guide on DEV Community walks through five chunking strategies that cover most production retrieval-augmented generation pipelines in 2026. The article argues that chunking is often glossed over in tutorials, yet it drives many retrieval failures, and that the right approach depends on document structure and query shape. It identifies three failure modes: chunks that are too large and dilute specificity, chunks that are too small and lose context, and chunks that split definitions from their examples. Each strategy is accompanied by runnable Python code and guidance on when it performs best. The piece follows up on an earlier article covering the full four-step RAG loop.