Vector Staleness

An embedding is a snapshot. When the source record changes and the vector is not regenerated, retrieval operates on the old meaning while display shows the new text — a discrepancy that produces answers citing a document that no longer says what was quoted. The failure is silent and grows with corpus churn. Detecting it requires comparing index timestamps against record modification dates, which is straightforward if the index is inspectable and impossible if it is a vendor black box.

Because the Vector Index in Centralpoint sits in the organization's own environment and indexing is tied to record lifecycle, staleness is measurable: index state can be compared against record state directly. A vector index inspector makes the comparison a report rather than an inference from answer quality.