Library// topic
Retrieval and grounding: answering from your own content
In short
Everything that happens at query time — how a passage is chosen, ranked, filtered by permission and cited — and how you tell 'the wrong documents came back' apart from 'the right documents, badly used'; the plumbing that gets content into the index lives in the data cluster, and eval methodology lives in the release-gate cluster.
5 pages
diagnostics
- It worked on five hundred documents and broke at fifty thousandNothing regressed when the corpus grew. A candidate budget that comfortably held the answer at 500 documents now competes against a hundred times as many near-neighbours, and k never moved.diagnostic11 min
- The assistant quoted a policy that was replaced last quarterThe old version is still indexed, or it is gone and a cache is still serving it, or both versions are live and the old one ranks higher. One probe separates them.diagnostic10 min
- The citation points at the wrong paragraphA misaligned citation is a pipeline bug with a deterministic cause; an invented one is a grounding failure. One exact-string search against the original file separates them in under 5 minutes.diagnostic10 min
- The right passages were retrieved and the answer is still wrongIf the answer-bearing passage was in the context and the answer is still wrong, retrieval tuning cannot help. Four synthesis defects produce this, and each leaves its own mark in the output.diagnostic11 min
- You know the document is indexed and it still never comes backFour layers can quietly drop one document, and they look identical from the outside. Probe them in cost order — existence, filter, exact text, rank — and each probe eliminates exactly one.diagnostic10 min
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