Personal Knowledge Base

What belongs in a personal knowledge base?

Store material you are allowed to use and may want AskCc to retrieve during an interview: project retrospectives, technical notes, company research, summaries of public papers, and interview Q&A you wrote yourself.

Do not upload former-employer secrets, unauthorized internal material, another person’s personal data, or paid content you have no right to process.

How do I create and connect a personal knowledge base?

1. Open Knowledge Base from the sidebar

   Click Create Knowledge Base and use a name that explains the topic and purpose, such as “Recommendation project evidence.”

2. Upload documents

   Supported formats include PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, TXT, Markdown, HTML, and common images. PDF, Office, and Excel files are limited to 50 MiB, images to 15 MiB, and text/HTML to 8 MiB each.

   You can select files, select a folder, or drop files and folders together. A folder is scanned once—it is not linked or kept in sync, and its path and structure are not uploaded. Each selection can contain up to 50 valid files; if it contains more, select smaller groups. AskCc uploads two files at a time, while each file keeps its own upload, processing, and billing result.

   Upload processing uses the verified file size: document 1 Credit/MiB, image 2 Credits/MiB, and text 5 Credits/MiB. The charge is applied once when the processing task is durably accepted. A later processing failure is not automatically refunded, and provider retries for that accepted document do not charge it again.

3. Wait for the document to show Ready

   Uploaded or Processing does not mean searchable. If processing fails, check the format and readability, then upload again.

4. Select it in the preparation chat

   When AskCc asks for knowledge sources, select one personal knowledge base or explicitly skip the step. Creating a knowledge base does not select it in the shared interview profile.

5. Test it with a real question

   In a mock interview, ask a question that the document clearly answers and check whether the response respects the facts and boundaries.

Each successful knowledge retrieval during preparation uses 1 Credit, including a successful call with no matches. Failed, timed-out, or cancelled calls are not charged. Knowledge retrieval inside a live interview is included in interview time and does not separately consume AI Credits.

What document structure works best for retrieval?

Write each independent topic as a user question followed by enough evidence to answer it. Use the question as the section heading, give the direct answer first, and then list facts, sources, scope, and unknowns.

## What did I own in the recommendation project?

Answer: I owned retrieval strategy, offline evaluation, and post-launch metric review.

- Evidence: Project update dated 2026-03-12, section 2; merge record PR-184.
- Key actions: Reworked candidate generation, defined offline evaluation, joined launch review.
- Result: Lower latency is confirmed; the exact business lift is not verified.
- Boundary: I can discuss scope and method, but must not claim an unverified uplift.
- Last verified: 2026-07-30.

Why use question–evidence pairs?

Users search with questions, while source documents often use project names, acronyms, or narrative prose. Writing the questions a section can answer reduces vocabulary mismatch. Keeping sufficient evidence in the same section reduces the risk of retrieving a relevant passage that still cannot answer the question.

This writing pattern does not guarantee that every embedding model improves. Validate it with real queries, Recall@K, and an evidence-sufficiency check.

What should each question–evidence section include?

• Complete question: a sentence a user would ask, not only “Project responsibilities.”
• Direct answer: self-contained subject, action, and conclusion in the first paragraph.
• Verifiable facts: files, dates, public links, results, or visible product steps.
• Scope: version, date, role, region, or prerequisites.
• Unknowns: clearly mark unverified numbers and missing facts.
• Review date: add a last-verified date for fast-changing information.

How should I organize many similar questions?

Give each section one main intent. “How do I start an interview?”, “Why can I not start?”, and “Which permissions are required?” should be separate sections rather than one long “Using interviews” section.

Explain a fact fully in one owner section and link to it elsewhere. Do not maintain several slightly different copies.

Why might a knowledge base not appear in an answer?

Common reasons include:

• the interview profile did not select that knowledge base;
• the document is still processing or failed;
• the question is unrelated to the document;
• the document is relevant but lacks enough evidence to answer;
• the request is a standalone screen question, which primarily uses the current screenshot.

Tip

Test 5–10 real interview questions before uploading more material. A small, clear, verifiable collection is usually easier to maintain than a large mixed archive.