Debug invented citations and overconfident prose

Break the artifact on purpose. The most important failure family is fluent answer with invented or mismatched citations. Reproduce one failure with the smallest possible input, inspect the intermediate values, and fix the boundary or algorithm rather than catching every exception. Retrying deterministic bad input only repeats the same mistake; a retry is justified only for a transient dependency.

Invented citations often reuse real-looking IDs. Fixtures should include retrieved sets that omit the ID the model wants. Overconfident prose without IDs must become abstain, not a warning buried in text.

The artifact's user-facing goal is specific: map every factual claim to retrieved chunk IDs and abstain when evidence is missing. Its accepted input is a research question plus a trusted, versioned document corpus with immutable chunk IDs. Those statements are intentionally narrower than “build an AI system.” Narrow scope lets us inspect every input and expected result, and it prevents a toy result from being presented as a production claim. System shape for this chapter: an ingestion path normalizes trusted documents into immutable chunks; retrieval selects evidence; an answer model emits structured claims with chunk IDs; a deterministic verifier rejects unknown IDs and unsupported quotations before the API responds. Keep model calls behind adapters, keep authorization and validation in deterministic code, and carry stable IDs and versions through every response. That separation lets you decide whether a bad result came from input handling, retrieval, inference, validation, or deployment. This page's job is the debugging step: break the artifact on purpose. Setup baseline for the chapter (run once per machine, not secrets in git):

python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install pydantic fastapi uvicorn
mkdir -p corpus fixtures

If hardware or a hosted provider differs, preserve the interface and expected behavior. Do not present provider syntax as universal—when a vendor adapter is unavoidable, keep it behind a thin boundary and test with a fake first. The deliverable is not “it ran once”; it is a reproducible artifact another developer can inspect, including expected output and one deliberate failure related to fluent answer with invented or mismatched citations. Operationally, write down the owner of this stage, the command you ran, the observed output, and the next page's dependency on that output. If you cannot point to a file, fixture, metric, or config key, the stage is not done. Prefer small, reviewable increments: one contract, one path, one metric, one failure, one gate. When tradeoffs appear—latency versus quality, hit rate versus false hits, local privacy versus cloud quality—record both numbers instead of moving the threshold until the report looks green. The chapter ships only when evidence for citation validity ≥ 0.99, unsupported-claim rate ≤ 0.02, correct abstention on no-evidence questions and a rehearsed recovery path exist beside structured research API that returns claims, evidence IDs, or an explicit abstention.

Save this as lesson.py and run python3 lesson.py. Prefer the standard library or the pinned packages from the setup block so the example stays reproducible.

def verify(claims, retrieved):
    for c in claims:
        if not c.get("evidence_ids"): return "abstain"
        if any(e not in retrieved for e in c["evidence_ids"]): return "invalid_citation"
    return "ok"
print(verify([{"text":"x","evidence_ids":["missing"]}], ["c1"]))

Expected output: invalid_citation. Exact floating-point formatting may vary slightly, but the asserted behavior must not. Read the output as evidence about this stage, not merely proof that the interpreter started.

Reproduce fluent answer with invented or mismatched citations as a fixture. Fix one cause at a time. Do not catch broad exceptions and return an apparently successful answer. At the debugging stage, save the smallest failing fixture beside the expected result. Change one cause at a time and rerun the exact command printed above; that makes the repair reviewable and keeps this chapter's progressive artifact reproducible.

Record latency and failure class for each injected fault. Clear degradation beats a wrong success. For this debugging page, preserve the fixture and result as evidence for the next page. Label observations separately from conclusions: a passing assertion establishes the behavior it names, while broader usefulness requires the chapter's full evaluation set and stated operating limits. Primary metrics for the chapter remain citation validity ≥ 0.99, unsupported-claim rate ≤ 0.02, correct abstention on no-evidence questions.