Failure modes

Learn in five minutes

• Missed retrieval: the passage exists and was not returned.
• Empty notes: the passage does not exist and the model should refuse.
• Distractor: a similar passage is the wrong one.
• Stale note: the text is old. Date the note.
• Lab 06 is a small ablation of keyword versus a naive neighbor. Confirm before you treat it as your corpus.

Label the failure before you change the prompt. A prompt rewrite does not fix a missed index.

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Visual

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Flow SVGFlow PNGFlow HTML

Name the failure

1. Take a wrong answer.
2. Ask: was the right passage returned?
3. If no, the failure is retrieval.
4. If yes, the failure is reading or the instruction.
5. Write one label.

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Quiz

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Ecosystem

Ablation

Turning one piece off to see what changes.

Sisters: Search indexes, Embeddings, Rerankers, Citations.

A voice agent and a chat agent can share the same note index.

The capstone answers only from notes you are allowed to use.

Config

• Write the goal in one sentence.
• Name the input and the allowed output.
• Save the trace next to the result.

Troubleshooting

• The answer looks fluent and is wrong. Check whether a source passage actually contains the claim.
• The loop never stops. Set a step cap and stop when the tool result repeats.

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