Better documentation for nRetreive and nFinal

[lendle]

Validations

• [X] I believe this is a way to improve. I'll try to join the Continue Discord for questions
• [X] I'm not able to find an open issue that requests the same enhancement

Problem

The Codebase Retrieval docs say

nRetrieve
Number of results to initially retrieve from vector database (default: 25)
nFinal: Final number of results to use after re-ranking (default: 5)

But it's not clear to me what those do. What I thought it means was 25 results are retrieved from the local vector db, maybe comparing an embedding of the question to the files in the project, then those are reranked and 5 are chosen to include in context to the chat LLM. But I use @codebase or @folder, often more than 5 files are included in context, so I must be wrong about that. Somewhat related, what to elements in the vector db correspond to? Files, parts of files, or something else?

Solution

It would be helpful if more information was provided on how retrieval works and what those parameters do.