Withdrawn public comments must stop appearing in RAG without hard-deleting audit history in PostgreSQL. What model fits?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Soft-delete is a ‘withdrawn’ sticky note on the comment—RAG walks past it, but the archive shelf still has the paper if auditors need it.
Full Explanation
Withdrawn public comments must leave the RAG result set without destroying audit history in PostgreSQL. Soft-delete flags let RAG queries exclude withdrawn comments while rows remain available for municipal audit, FOIA-style review, and records retention that cities commonly require. Hard-deleting every withdrawn comment immediately and losing audit history conflicts with retention and investigative needs common in civic records programs. Leaving withdrawn comments fully visible to RAG with no exclusion filter continues to ground answers on content that should no longer be cited to the public or staff assistants. Moving withdrawn text into the embedding vector itself as a hidden watermark does not reliably exclude those chunks from similarity search and confuses representation with lifecycle state. Exam caveat: soft delete is a query-filter and retention pattern; physical purge may still occur later under records policy, but not as the first RAG response after withdrawal. Operationally, add an is_withdrawn (or equivalent) flag, require RAG SQL to filter it on every retrieval path, backfill historical withdrawals, and sample retrieval to confirm withdrawn comments no longer appear in municipal answers.