Look up before you make up

The cheapest reliability discipline available to an agent system: check before you assert.

Published ARIES-ART-002

The failure is not that a system does not know something. It is that the system produces an answer anyway, in the register of something that does know.

The discipline is unglamorous: before asserting a fact, resolve it against a source of record. Before naming an entity, check whether it already exists under another label. The cost is one lookup. The cost of skipping it is a confident wrong answer that nobody catches until it has been acted on.

  • Resolve entities against a registry before minting a new one
  • Attach the source to the assertion, not to the summary
  • Treat an empty lookup as a finding, not as permission to invent

Terms used

Definitions

Retrieval quality
Whether what comes back is the right material, established by evaluation against known-correct answers rather than by inspection. Untested retrieval usually returns something topically related and confidently wrong, which is the failure mode hardest to notice in production. See also: Context supply chain, Learning loop

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