embedding-profiles.md

Embedding Profiles

The plugin now supports a lightweight embeddingProfile setting for named local model metadata defaults.

Default selection baseline as of 2026-03-28:

• default embedding profile: all-minilm-l6-v2
• bundled fallback profile: all-minilm-l6-v2

Why:

• MiniLM keeps the local LongMemEval retrieval slice inside the target memory envelope on macOS.
• Nomic remains available as an explicit opt-in profile for long-context experiments.
• Nomic ONNX on macOS is fragile with CoreML execution and can trigger multi-GB RSS, so it is no longer the safe bundled default.

Current shipped profile names:

• all-minilm-l6-v2

  • family: all-minilm-l6-v2
  • dimensions: 384
  • normalize: true
  • max context tokens: 128

• nomic-embed-text-v1.5

  • family: nomic-embed-text-v1.5
  • dimensions: 768
  • normalize: true
  • max context tokens: 8192

How it works:

• embeddingProfile supplies metadata defaults like family, dimensions, and normalize behavior.
• onnx-local still requires local model assets through embeddingModelPath, typically a directory containing embedding.json.
• The manifest may override or refine the profile, but explicit dimension mismatches fail closed.
• The sidecar store persists an embedding fingerprint, so reopening an existing store with a different effective model profile will fail instead of silently mixing vector spaces.

Recommended usage:

• bundled for the shipped default path, which now prefers MiniLM for local stability.
• onnx-local plus embeddingProfile when a power user wants a known model family like Nomic with local assets.
• treat remote/Ollama providers as future separate backend types, not as overloads of custom-local.