mirror of
https://github.com/okieselbach/AutopilotMonitor.git
synced 2026-10-24 12:42:38 +00:00
Oliver Kieselbach
1821af6f05
The live test found a third recall gap. The fallback only topped up when semantic
search returned FEWER than topK results — but the more common failure is a full
list of unconvincing ones. Querying "WOW6432Node" returned three chunks scoring
~0.29, none containing the word, while the single chunk that does was never
considered at all.
The fix is a ranking change, so it was measured rather than reasoned about. Adds
scripts/eval-docs-search.ts, which scores strategies over 2465 queries in three
deliberately different classes: every chunk heading (easy by construction, so a
regression detector), rare identifiers (the class this fallback serves), and
hand-written questions (the reality anchor — not derived from the corpus, so it
shares little vocabulary with it). Embeddings are computed once and each strategy
is a pure function over the same candidates, so sweeping a threshold costs no
extra inference.
known-item literal handwritten MRR fixed broken
append-only (before) 71.9% 66.2% 1.000 - -
weak < 0.30 71.9% 72.6% 1.000 142 0
weak < 0.35 73.7% 81.1% 1.000 335 0
weak < 0.40 76.3% 88.2% 0.944 502 3
weak < 0.45 77.2% 93.0% 0.889 613 5
0.35 is strictly dominant — better in every class, worse in none — so that is
what ships. Higher thresholds keep repairing identifier queries but start
demoting hand-written questions, the class that most resembles real use, so the
gain stops being free. When the head is weak, exact matches move to the front
while at least one semantic result is kept, so a weak-but-correct hit is never
pushed out entirely.
The measurement also resized the problem: identifier queries were succeeding only
66.2% of the time, so the reported case was one of roughly 750, not an outlier.
That is the part a single anecdote could not have shown, and the reason the
harness exists before the fix rather than after it.
Verified: 447 tests pass, including new cases for the weak path and for leaving a
confident ranking untouched. On the real corpus "WOW6432Node" now returns the
chunk that contains it at rank 1, while "how do I deploy the agent with Intune"
(0.819) and "what firewall URLs do I need to allow" (0.374) are unchanged and the
negative controls stay empty.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>