Building a Privacy-Focused Knowledge Manager Under a 150 ms Retrieval Budget

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A developer's build log describes designing retrieval for a privacy-focused personal knowledge manager around a fixed latency budget. The author allots 150 ms to the interactive retrieval path, split across request parsing, the vector query, and citation assembly. Each result carries metadata such as document ID, source URI, update time, and a sensitivity label, with workspace, document type, and sensitivity acting as mandatory filters. A newly edited document only becomes searchable once its ingestion record confirms the vector write completed, preventing stale citations. The post also recommends a small evaluation set scored against expected source IDs and a staged pipeline in which the system reports insufficient evidence rather than broadening filters.

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