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Ask Canon

2 min read

Ask Canon sits at the top of the Canon page. It answers the question every user of a grounded feature actually has: does my document get found?

It runs the same search that grounds generation and shows you the raw result — the passages, their source documents, and their scores. There is no model in between and nothing is created.

Section titled “Run a Search”

  1. Open Canon in a project.

  2. Type a question the way a spec would phrase it — for example, what happens when a card is expired?

  3. Select Search, or press Enter.

Each result shows the document title, the section it came from, the passage text, and a relevance score. That is exactly the material a generation run would receive for the same subject.

Reading the Results

Section titled “Reading the Results”

The score is a relevance number, not a percentage of correctness. Use the results relative to each other rather than against a fixed threshold.

What to look for:

  • The right document is at the top. If the accessibility standard outranks the login spec on a login question, your login spec is probably thin.
  • The passage says something testable. A section intro that scores well but only describes what a feature is for will not produce a good test case.
  • The section locator is meaningful. §4.2 Expiry handling is a citation a reviewer can check. A locator pointing at a whole 40-page document is not.

When Nothing Matches

Section titled “When Nothing Matches”

If no passage matches, the panel says so plainly:

Nothing in Canon matched this. Generation on this topic will be ungrounded.

That is a real finding, not an error. It means a generation run on that subject will fall back on the model’s own assumptions about how systems like yours behave.

Options, in order of usefulness:

  1. Add the missing document. The topic genuinely is not documented.
  2. Check the document reached Ready. A document mid-ingest or failed is listed but indexes nothing — see Manage Canon documents.
  3. Rephrase toward the document’s language. Retrieval matches against the documents, so a question phrased in spec language finds more than one phrased in test jargon.

Use It Before a Large Run

Section titled “Use It Before a Large Run”

Ask Canon is cheapest to use before generating, not after.

A good habit before a big generation run: search two or three of the subjects you are about to generate against. If they come back thin, you have learned it in ten seconds instead of after reviewing forty ungrounded drafts.

Section titled “Related Guides”