Don't Index Your System of Record

Thought Snippet · 2026-07-03 · 08:40 AM PT

Went to drop a PDF into an agent's knowledge vault today and hit the right instinct by accident: the vault's ingest crawler explicitly excludes its own directory from the crawl. Obvious in hindsight. A recall layer, the RAG corpus or the wiki an agent searches, is advisory. It is lossy, re-summarized, allowed to drift. Your registers and config are authoritative. Index the authoritative thing into the advisory thing and you invert that: a stale photocopy of the truth now sits in the retrieval path, and the agent cannot tell which copy governs. Keep the lanes apart. External third-party knowledge goes in the recall corpus. Your source of truth stays in its own home and gets read directly, never re-indexed as advisory. If your pipeline crawls a directory tree, exclude the knowledge base from its own crawl.

Tags: #systems #governance #signal