citations

Citations turn a RAG answer from 'trust me' into something checkable, and they are a genuine engineering problem. The signal is grounding each claim to a specific passage and verifying the attribution, not tacking a bag of links onto the end.

Retrieval is exonerated, so the bug lives in generation. There are four usual causes and they have different fixes, and the one nobody names is that the model was never given permission to say it does not know.

Everyone can write the happy path. The screen is decided by the two branches most candidates skip: what the system does when retrieval finds nothing good, and what it does when the model cites a chunk you never sent.

The modern agentic system-design question. The signal is the plan, search, read, synthesize, verify loop with per-claim citations, plus keeping cost and latency bounded. The hard parts are not the writing.

Legal review is high-stakes and precision-critical: a missed clause or hallucinated citation carries real consequences, and lawyers have been sanctioned over fabricated cites. The signal is grounding in the actual documents, citing exact passages, and lawyer-in-the-loop. Here is the design.