FAQ
Short answers to the questions people ask before trusting indx with their documents.
Does planning call an LLM or an OCR engine?
Section titled “Does planning call an LLM or an OCR engine?”No. Preflight is cheap, local, and deterministic. No OCR, no model, no rendering, no network. That is what makes a plan safe to request, inspect, and throw away.
What does a stock install actually do?
Section titled “What does a stock install actually do?”uv sync --all-packages gives you the router, native text extraction, and manual review. OCR, VLM, and model-backed embeddings are extras (--extra ocr, --extra vlm, --extra fastembed, --extra hosted). GET /v1/capabilities reports what the current environment can route against and names the missing extra for anything it cannot run. A capability is never silently absent.
Why is manual review a route?
Section titled “Why is manual review a route?”It is the terminal rung of the ladder. A human can read anything, so an exhausted ladder ends at a person instead of at a silently dropped page. Removing it changes the failure mode: an install without it answers 503 when nothing else can read a page.
Are the cost numbers measured?
Section titled “Are the cost numbers measured?”No. The routed and all-VLM figures are both estimates from the same economics table. The VLM baseline is never executed. Output quality is not scored yet. The benchmarks page says exactly what is and is not claimed.
What happens to a page nothing can read?
Section titled “What happens to a page nothing can read?”The ladder descends, and every attempt is recorded in the execution trace. The block is reported unreadable or failed with a reason. Producing nothing at all is the failure indx refuses to have; an empty page is a completed read of a blank page.
Can execution change the plan?
Section titled “Can execution change the plan?”No. Execution may use only the selected route and the fallbacks the plan already declared. A source whose digest no longer matches the plan is rejected with 409. Re-deciding requires asking for a new plan.
Is there persistence, a hosted service, or RAG export?
Section titled “Is there persistence, a hosted service, or RAG export?”Planned Not yet. Persistence, RAG export, and separate router/executor deployments follow measured baselines, deliberately. The current system is one deployable unit you run yourself. See goals and non-goals.
How do I add my own capability?
Section titled “How do I add my own capability?”Publish a distribution that registers a provider in the indx.capabilities entry-point group. Installing it is what makes the capability routable — no fork, no code change in indx. Extend indx walks through a complete package.