Made by AI TechInspectable systems journal

FIELD 01 / FAILURE REPORT

The stale cache looked like a model failure

A corrected source still produced the old answer for some users.

01

Situation

The team changed the source and prompt, then compared responses without recording retrieval and cache versions.

02

Finding

A response cache survived the source update. Model retries made the problem appear intermittent instead of deterministic.

03

Response

  1. Expose source and cache version
  2. Invalidate by source change
  3. Add stale-answer fixture
  4. Separate generation retry from cache read
ARCHITECTURE LESSON

Before tuning the model, prove which source, index, cache, prompt, and version produced the answer.