Use AI · Chapter 3 of 13
Turn three messy documents into a brief you can trust
Make sources visible, catch a contradiction, and produce an answer someone can check.
About 5 minutes · school-level background
Edition 2026-10-28.1 · Checked 2026-10-28
What you will understand
Produce a short source-linked brief by separating extraction, comparison and writing.
In this lesson
Build the idea
The attractive answer with one dangerous detail
You ask an assistant to summarise an event. It produces a smooth paragraph with a date, venue and ticket price. You are ready to post it. Then you notice that the venue came from last month’s poster while the time came from yesterday’s update. Every individual detail appeared somewhere in the inputs, yet the combined event never existed. This is why asking for a summary is sometimes too vague. You need a process that preserves which source supports which claim.
Here, a source is one document or message that you supply. A claim is one statement you might put in the final brief. The connection between them is the useful part. If the source changes, you can find which claim to revisit. You do not need a complicated research system to start: a table with a claim, source label, date and unresolved issue is enough.
Collect dated sources
Extract individual claims
Compare conflicting details
Write with links and unresolved gaps
A simplified reading aid. Follow the article for sources, conditions and limits.
What the source reports
A small process you can inspect
Anthropic’s engineering essay describes chaining smaller steps and checking intermediate outputs. We use that general pattern here: extract facts, compare them, then draft. The exercise below is original and fictional. It is not an evaluation of Anthropic’s products or a claim that this workflow always removes errors.
Original report: Anthropic: Building effective agents
Worked teaching example
Your three input documents
Use these invented notes. Note A is a poster dated 1 April: the workshop is on 18 April at North Hall, starts at 18:00, costs five pounds, and welcomes beginners. Note B is an organiser update dated 10 April: the same workshop has moved to East Room and now starts at 18:30; previously advertised tickets remain valid. Note C is a volunteer note dated 11 April: bring a laptop if you have one; a few shared laptops may be available; ask the organiser if you need one.
Before writing a summary, list the fields you need: event date, place, start time, price, audience and equipment. The date is supported by A and not changed by B. The place and time are updated by B. The price of new tickets is not explicitly restated in B. The sentence about valid tickets supports existing ticket holders; it does not necessarily settle whether new tickets still cost five pounds. That distinction is small enough to miss and important enough to preserve.
Now ask yourself whether beginners must own a laptop. C says to bring one if you have one and mentions possible shared devices. It does not guarantee a shared laptop or require ownership. An accurate draft can say that attendees needing a device should check availability. It should not advertise free guaranteed laptop hire. The point of the table is to catch these quiet upgrades in meaning before attractive prose hides them.
Use the idea
Write an instruction with a visible intermediate result
Try this instruction: use only Notes A, B and C; first make a table of the six requested fields; for each field give the source and whether it is confirmed, updated or unresolved; then draft a short event brief that uses the table; do not fill missing details from general knowledge. Ask the assistant to keep unresolved information in a separate list. You can copy this structure for comparing public resources, preparing a meeting brief or organising study material.
Check the table before the draft. For the venue row, you should see East Room supported by B, with North Hall identified as the older value. For the time row, you should see 18:30. For equipment, the uncertainty about shared laptops should survive. If a row has no source, ask where it came from. A citation that points to a whole document is only a starting point; the supporting sentence must actually say what the row claims.
This is also a small introduction to retrieval. Retrieval means finding the pieces of information relevant to a question. With three notes, you can do it by eye. With many documents, software may retrieve selected passages before a model writes. Supplying relevant passages can help, but a retrieved passage can still be old, incomplete or in conflict with another. The final check remains whether the selected evidence supports the answer you plan to use.
Worked teaching example
Make a failure useful
Add this new question: when should volunteers arrive? None of the three notes gives an arrival time. A successful answer is that it is not specified. If the assistant replies 18:00 because volunteers usually arrive early, it has changed a plausible convention into a reported fact. Record this as a test case. You have found a concrete behaviour to improve, and another reader can repeat the check without guessing what you meant by hallucination.
Next, change Note B to say only that the room has changed, without naming the new room. The old room should no longer be presented as current, and the new one should remain unknown. This is a stronger check than asking the same question again. You changed the evidence, so the answer should change in a predictable way. Good testing asks whether the system follows the source, not whether it repeats a sentence you liked.
Use the idea
Finish with a handoff someone else can read
Your deliverable can contain a short public draft, the evidence table and three open questions: the new-ticket price, shared-device availability and volunteer arrival time. Keep the original notes or their public links next to it. If a person later supplies an answer, they can update the relevant row and draft sentence. They do not need to reconstruct the whole conversation with your assistant.
Use invented or genuinely public material while practising. Before using someone else’s documents in a service, obtain permission and check the tool’s relevant data terms. The habit you are building is precise reuse: know what went in, what came out, and where a reader can check it. Once you can do that with three little notes, more ambitious reading tasks have a much stronger foundation.
Words you can now use
- Claim
- A statement whose support can be checked.
- Retrieval
- Selecting information relevant to the current question.
- Provenance
- The origin and history of a piece of information.
Check your understanding
An old poster says tickets cost five pounds. A newer update says existing tickets remain valid. Does that prove new tickets still cost five pounds?
Show the explanation
No. It confirms something about existing tickets, not necessarily the current price for a new purchase. Preserve the old price as a dated source statement and leave the current new-ticket price unresolved.
Read the original sources
- Anthropic: Building effective agentsEngineering experience · Published 2024-12-19 · Checked 2026-10-28
Try it with your own assistant
Select and copy this bounded exercise. A normal chat assistant is enough to start.
Use the three fictional notes in this lesson. Ask a chat assistant for a six-row evidence table and a short public draft. Check that the older venue and price are not silently combined with the newer time. Leave the arrival time unknown.
Keep the task brief, supplied inputs, checked output and unresolved questions together. Using this exercise does not submit anything to WRS.