I Built a Vector Database Project from Scratch — Here’s What Actually Happened

A few weeks ago, I decided to stop just reading about vector databases and actually build something with them. Not a tutorial clone. Not a copy-paste project. Something messy, slightly broken, and real. This is a write-up of what I built, what I learned the hard way, and what I would not do again. Why I Started This Everywhere I looked, people were talking about embeddings, semantic search, and AI-powered retrieval. But most tutorials felt shallow. They showed how to use a library, not why thing