Hey everyone! I'm still pretty new to this whole RAG and LLM orchestration thing. I've been using a vector store (like Pinecone) for my small projects, and it works okay for simple Q&A.
But I just tried LlamaIndex for the first time and had a real 'aha' moment. I was struggling with a document that had a lot of summary tables and cross-references. My basic vector search kept giving me weird, chopped-up answers. Then I read about using an index, and I tried the `VectorStoreIndex`. Suddenly, the LLM could pull from different parts of the doc and connect the ideas! It wasn't just finding a single chunk anymore.
So my question is: when do you *really* need an index over just a plain vector store? Is it mostly for complex documents? Or is there a rule of thumb for beginners? Like, start with just a vector store for X, but switch to an index when Y happens? Would love some simple examples to help it click!