Updates and Deletion: How an AI Knowledge Base Keeps Up When Documents Change or Disappear
When documents change or are deleted, the index doesn't keep up on its own. A sturdier incremental sync uses a content hash to find which documents changed and redoes only those; deletion has to reach every place a document is stored, including the full-text index and the vector store. Many tools don't handle deletion by default, and deletes and updates can take a while to take effect. Why clean up thoroughly: one preprint put a single outdated document into the context, and two small models flipped three to four in ten medical questions they had answered correctly; when told to answer from the documents, that rose to between two-thirds and three-quarters.