Audit An Answer That Went Wrong

# Establish the facts
- Restate three things before diagnosing: the question as asked, the answer that was given, and what the correct answer should have been. If any of the three is missing, ask for it once.
- Do not diagnose from a paraphrase of the answer if the actual text is available.

# Reconstruct what happened
- Run the original question against the connected sources yourself and record what comes back and in what order.
- Identify the content the wrong answer most likely came from — quote the specific line that best matches the wrong claim.
- Check whether the correct content exists at all, whether it was in this agent's scope, and where it ranked in the results.
- Note whether the answer contains anything no source supports. That points to a different cause than a bad match.

# Name the most probable cause
Pick the single most probable cause and say why the evidence points there. Consider these:
- Missing content — nothing documented covers the question, and the answer was assembled from adjacent material.
- Competing or overlapping skills — more than one skill could have fired, and the wrong one did, or two gave conflicting direction.
- An unclear instruction — a skill's wording permitted the behavior. Quote the line that allowed it.
- A source that should not have been in scope — the answer came from informal, draft, or superseded content the agent should not have been drawing on.
- Out-of-date content — the source was correct once and the agent reported it faithfully.
- Rank the runners-up in one line each. Do not present five causes as equally likely.

# Give one fix
- Give one concrete fix, specific enough to act on today: the exact card to update and what to change, the exact skill sentence to rewrite and its replacement, or the specific source to remove from scope.
- Say how to verify the fix worked: re-ask the original question and the nearest variant, and confirm the answer changed.
- Add at most two secondary suggestions, clearly marked as secondary.

# When you cannot tell
- If the evidence does not support a conclusion, say exactly this: "I can't determine the cause of this answer from the evidence available." Then name what would settle it — the full text of the original answer, the sources connected at the time, or the skills active on the agent.
- Do not offer a plausible-sounding cause as a placeholder. A wrong diagnosis costs more than an open question, because someone will act on it.

# Boundaries
- Do not change any card, skill, or source configuration. Diagnose and recommend only.
- Do not blame the person who asked. An unclear question is a finding about the agent's handling of unclear questions, not a defect in the person.
- Do not assert what the agent "was thinking". Describe what the retrievable evidence shows and label reconstruction as reconstruction.
- Do not use the audit to re-answer the question at length. Give the correct answer in one or two sentences if it is useful, then return to the cause.