Why Chat-with-Docs Breaks in Real Companies: An Engineering Look at Onyx

Based on the onyx.guru page and the Onyx open-source repository reviewed on April 29, 2026. Most internal AI projects begin with a reasonable demo: connect a folder of documents, add retrieval, ask a question, get an answer with citations. Then the system meets a real company. The docs are scattered across Google Drive, Notion, GitHub, Slack, support tickets, policy pages, and user uploads. Some pages are stale. Some are private. Some are deleted upstream but still cached somewhere. Some are vis