Posts tagged Cache Invalidation — AI × software engineering, made practical.
Most 'the AI got it wrong' tickets in a RAG system aren't model bugs at all — they're stale index entries in a hallucination costume, and a 3-question checklist tells you which one you're actually chasing.
A scheduling agent swore up and down it was March in September — and the root cause wasn't a bad model, it was an idempotency key that never found out the function behind it had changed.
Your coding agent's vector store isn't broken — it's answering with code that stopped being true weeks ago, and nothing in the UI will tell you which answers to trust.
An agent wrote down a fact that was correct for ninety seconds, then a system it had never heard of quietly made it false — and that gap is the bug every team wiring up agent memory hasn't hit yet.
A Claude Code subagent had room to spare and still rebuilt a feature on a file a teammate had deleted twelve minutes earlier — the cache bug hiding inside every long agent session, and four concrete hooks that kill it.