The Knowledge-Base Observatory
Draft, deploy-gated. The full narrative publishes with the Lab launch; the sections below are content-free by construction.
Most knowledge bases are black boxes: you put documents in, you get retrieval out, and you have no way to inspect what happened in between. We built the opposite, a knowledge base you can observe without a dashboard account, and without ever exposing a single private document.
Three lanes
The observatory presents each knowledge base in three lanes:
- Inventory, the structure: documents and chunks, their counts, and their metadata. You can see how much is in the base and how it is organized, without reading what is inside.
- Retrieval, worked examples of why a chunk was returned for a query. The signal that drove the match is shown as a coarse score, so you can reason about retrieval quality without seeing the underlying text.
- Learning, constrained autolearn: how the base updates over time, with the same candidate-and-gate discipline used elsewhere, never a silent rewrite.
What you can see
The observatory is designed for trust and debugging. You can inspect KB structure, document and chunk metadata, retrieval examples, freshness, embedding status, and which templates read from or write to each base. That is enough to answer the questions that actually matter: is retrieval working, is the data fresh, is a stale document dragging down quality.
What you can never see
Observability is not exposure. The observatory never shows full private documents, never shows embedding vectors, and never lets you run arbitrary queries over private data. Everything public is content-free by construction: identifiers, counts, coarse quality and freshness bands, and timestamps.
Freshness and stale-doc detection
A knowledge base silently rots when documents go stale and no one notices. Surfacing a freshness timeline and stale-document detection turns a hidden failure mode into a visible, public-safe signal: you can see that a base needs attention without seeing a word of what is inside it.