- Normalize text before embedding (strip mentions/URLs/emoji/markdown/control chars, lowercase, truncate) on both write and query sides so vectors aren't diluted and tokens aren't wasted
- embeddingClient: retry embeddings (maxRetries 2), validate batch dimension consistency, preserve index alignment for empty-normalized texts
- archiveEmbedder: store normalized text in archive payload, skip empty-normalized content
- backend: normalize search queries, make archive search similarity threshold configurable (AI_LLM_EMBEDDING_ARCHIVE_MIN_SIMILARITY, default 0.6)
OpenAI SDK v6 defaults to encoding_format=base64; llama-nemotron-embed
(Nvidia-backed) returns 400 'do not support base64'. Semantic cache was
silently disabled in prod. encoding_format: 'float' fixes it.