continuedev/continue · error · Error

Query and chunks must not be empty

Error message

Query and chunks must not be empty

What it means

Thrown by BedrockReranker.rerank when the rerank request has a falsy query or an empty documents array. It is a client-side guard that runs before any AWS call, so it indicates malformed caller input rather than a Bedrock problem.

Source

Thrown at packages/openai-adapters/src/apis/Bedrock.ts:669

        }),
      );
    } else {
      throw new Error(`Unsupported model: ${body.model}`);
    }

    return embedding({
      data: embeddings,
      model: body.model,
      usage: {
        prompt_tokens: 0,
        total_tokens: 0,
      },
    });
  }

  async rerank(body: RerankCreateParams): Promise<CreateRerankResponse> {
    if (!body.query || !body.documents.length) {
      throw new Error("Query and chunks must not be empty");
    }

    // Base payload for both models
    const payload: any = {
      query: body.query,
      documents: body.documents,
      top_n: body.top_k ?? body.documents.length,
    };

    // Add api_version for Cohere model
    if (body.model.startsWith("cohere.rerank")) {
      payload.api_version = 2;
    }

    try {
      const responseBody = await this.getInvokeModelResponseBody(
        body.model,
        payload,

View on GitHub (pinned to 5522c6f44c)

Solutions

1. Ensure documents array is non-empty before calling rerank; skip reranking when retrieval returned 0 chunks.
2. Trim/validate the query string and reject empty queries upstream.
3. Default the top_n or pass-through fields only after the guard passes.

Example fix

// before
await reranker.rerank({ query, documents });
// after
if (!query.trim() || documents.length === 0) return results;
await reranker.rerank({ query, documents });

if (!body.query?.trim() || !body.documents?.length) throw new Error('skip rerank: empty input');

const isRerankable = (b: RerankCreateParams): boolean => Boolean(b?.query?.trim()) && Array.isArray(b?.documents) && b.documents.length > 0;

When it happens

Trigger: Calling rerank({query: '', documents: [...]}) or rerank({query: 'q', documents: []}) or omitting either field; also when documents is undefined and .length access would otherwise fail.

Common situations: Retrieval pipelines where the chunker produced zero chunks for a document, or the query string was stripped/emptied by upstream sanitization before hitting the reranker.

Related errors

• AWS Bedrock rerank error (${(error as any).code}): ${error.m
• Error in BedrockReranker.rerank: ${error.message}
• Error in BedrockReranker.rerank: Unknown error occurred
• Unsupported tool type in Bedrock: ${tool.type}
• Unsupported embeddings type received: number[][]

AI-assisted analysis of continuedev/continue@5522c6f44c (2026-08-27). Data as JSON: /api/errors/58fa32455e00028f. Report an issue: GitHub.