A follow-up to How Old Is My Data?
The failure mode that gets worse when a machine is reading the data
In a classic dashboard, stale data is a human problem: someone looks at a number that's six hours old and makes a slightly worse decision. Annoying, rarely catastrophic.
Now hand that same data to a retrieval-augmented-generation (RAG) pipeline, or to an autonomous agent. The stakes change. The system doesn't pause to sanity-check the timestamp — it acts. And when the data it acts on is stale, three things are true at once:
The answer is confidently wrong.
