Research prompts: bind claims to a date and evidence record

Last updated: 5 Oct 202610 min read

tutorial

A research prompt should state the question, relevant date or time window, acceptable evidence, and the distinction between observed facts and inference. Retrieve material from authorized sources, record each item's date and identifier, and verify that the claim is supported by the item actually read. If the available evidence predates the event or two records conflict, report the gap. A model's memory cannot establish a current price, rule, or deployment status. The application should preserve a review trail without assuming that every retrieved page remains unchanged.

Decision in practice

An operations analyst asks whether a service-credit rule changed after an August release. The assistant inspects the approved policy versions and a release record, then reports the effective rule and date with internal evidence IDs. A meeting note says the change was planned, but the approved policy has no new version; the assistant does not describe the plan as active. If the policy store is unavailable, it states that current status is unverified. The reviewer can open the cited record, inspect its effective date, and see which parts of the answer are inference.

Question: rule active on 2026-09-18?
Evidence: approved policy version + effective date; release record.
Exclude: unapproved meeting plan as proof of activation.
Output: verified status, evidence IDs, unresolved conflict.
If current store unavailable: status unverified.

Performance and operating cost

Retrieval adds calls and review work, but it prevents stale model memory from posing as a current fact. For M candidate records, metadata filtering is O(M) before detailed reading. Limit the search by date and system of record, then broaden only when the evidence is insufficient. Measure unsupported claims and stale-record errors separately. A cached result needs an expiry tied to the source's update pattern; otherwise a fast answer can be systematically wrong after a policy change.

Common Mistakes

Do not treat a planned change as an active rule.
Do not answer a date-sensitive question from model memory alone.
Do not hide a conflict between records under a single confident sentence.

Connected lessons

Continue with: Research prompts: fix the question and eligibility first.

Continue with: Incident updates: separate facts, hypotheses, and ETA.

Continue with: Recurring prompts: bind local time and data windows.

Continue with: Security alert prompts: preserve event provenance and time.

prompt engineering

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