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FabledScribe/tests/test_retrieval_tuning.py
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feat(retrieval): the wide net becomes a pull — fifty candidates, no bar (#4103)
Milestone 416 step 5. The operator's compromise — "if you're worried
about excluding potentially important data let limit it to 50 entries"
— moved to the surface where it is safe. Fifty in the push would be
milestone 394 with extra steps; fifty in a pull crowds nothing out.

`what_might_apply(query)` returns ranked rule candidates with NO
threshold. The moment it serves is the one where the caller does not
trust a bar to decide for them, so it does not have one — every row
carries its score and the reader judges.

WHY IT IS NOT A BIGGER `limit` ON `search`

`_search_rules` returns statement, why and how_to_apply in full, on the
stated reasoning that a caller who went looking deserves the whole
record. That is the DEEP pull and should stay that way. This is the
SHALLOW one — many candidates, each just enough to decide whether to
open it. Opposite trade-offs, so it is a second tool.

THE PREMISE THE STEP GOT WRONG

The task said fifty "costs nothing". `_rule_hint_line` had already
measured otherwise: ~143 tokens per line once the trigger is rendered,
and #3855 tripled trigger lengths across the corpus. Fifty is ~7,000
tokens — cheap next to an arm firing before every Bash call, but not
free, and a tool promising a free wide net gets reached for casually
and then regretted.

So it reuses the graduated shape #3851 measured for the push: the top
few carry their trigger whole, the rest carry a cut of it. TRUNCATED,
never dropped — the trigger is what lets a reader judge without
opening, and a teaser without one is just an id. The cut borrows
`_goal_line`'s technique including the fallback that matters (#4036):
`textwrap.shorten` returns a bare "…" for one unbroken word.

TELEMETRY

Logged under its own pull source, asserted absent from both the tunable
push registry and AMBIENT_SOURCES. That guard is load-bearing right
now: the push arms' near-miss distributions are the evidence #4121
argues from, and a pull folded into them would move those numbers.

INSTRUCTION SURFACES

The using-scribe reflex and the MCP instructions both pointed at
`search(content_type="rule")` for the consequential moment — the deep
tool, at the moment you want breadth. They now point here, and keep
`search` for reading a rule you already suspect. Written as a practice
rather than a prohibition (rule 165).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-17 12:18:25 -04:00

196 lines
8.4 KiB
Python

"""Moving a floor, and the reason that has to come with it (#4102).
WHY THIS EXISTS
The operator handed the dial to the model: *"the user should be able to touch it
but the model should be the thing handling it 9 times out of 10."* Everything
here guards the half of that sentence people skip — the operator still has to be
able to see what was done on their behalf and disagree with it.
WHAT THIS PINS
1. **A reason is required, and "" does not count.** The column is NOT NULL,
which an empty string satisfies; the service is where the requirement is
real. This is the whole guardrail: a caller who must write down why has to
have looked, and a caller who writes down something wrong leaves the
operator a sentence to argue with. A number that moved silently leaves
nothing.
2. **The change is recorded, with what it was before.** Without `old_value` a
history cannot answer "was this always like that", which is the first
question anyone asks of a surface behaving oddly.
3. **A clamp is reported, never swallowed.** A caller that believes it set 1.4
will read the next telemetry as evidence about a bar that was never in
force — the same class of error as #3739, one layer up.
4. **An unknown surface is refused before anything is written.** Settings keys
are free-form strings, so a typo'd surface would write a key nothing reads:
a change that reports success and alters nothing.
5. **The tool teaches the procedure that works**, not the one the numbers
suggest. Asserted on the docstring because the docstring IS the contract an
agent reads, and the failure it prevents is a model tuning from a
percentile — which has been measured pointing the wrong way.
"""
from unittest.mock import AsyncMock, MagicMock, patch
import pytest
from scribe.services import retrieval_tuning as rt
from tests.helpers import make_mock_session
def _patches(floor=0.72, budget=3):
"""Patch everything `set_dial` touches except the thing under test."""
session = make_mock_session()
return session, (
patch.object(rt, "async_session", MagicMock(return_value=session)),
patch.object(rt, "set_setting", AsyncMock()),
patch.object(rt, "floor_for", AsyncMock(return_value=floor)),
patch.object(rt, "budget_for", AsyncMock(return_value=budget)),
)
@pytest.mark.asyncio
@pytest.mark.parametrize("reason", ["", " ", "noisy", "too high"])
async def test_a_change_without_a_real_reason_is_refused(reason):
"""The guardrail. "too high" is a restatement of the change, not a basis."""
session, ctx = _patches()
with ctx[0], ctx[1], ctx[2], ctx[3], pytest.raises(ValueError) as e:
await rt.set_dial(1, "prompt_rule", "floor", 0.66, reason=reason)
# The message has to name the tool that produces a real basis, or the
# caller's next move is a longer sentence rather than a look at the records.
assert "near_miss_samples" in str(e.value)
session.add.assert_not_called()
@pytest.mark.asyncio
async def test_nothing_is_written_when_the_reason_is_refused():
"""Refused BEFORE the setting is touched, not after.
Writing the value and then raising would leave the number moved and the
history empty — the exact state this table exists to make impossible.
"""
session, ctx = _patches()
with ctx[0], patch.object(rt, "set_setting", AsyncMock()) as setter, \
ctx[2], ctx[3]:
with pytest.raises(ValueError):
await rt.set_dial(1, "prompt_rule", "floor", 0.66, reason="x")
setter.assert_not_called()
@pytest.mark.asyncio
async def test_a_good_change_writes_the_setting_and_the_event():
session, ctx = _patches(floor=0.72)
reason = ("read prompt_rule's 5 highest declines: 3 were project rules for "
"another repo, so the bar is doing its job here")
with ctx[0], patch.object(rt, "set_setting", AsyncMock()) as setter, \
ctx[2], ctx[3]:
out = await rt.set_dial(1, "prompt_rule", "floor", 0.66, reason=reason)
setter.assert_awaited_once()
_uid, key, stored = setter.await_args.args
assert key == "kb_promptrule_threshold" and stored == "0.66"
event = session.add.call_args.args[0]
assert event.surface == "prompt_rule" and event.dial == "floor"
# The before-value is what makes the history answerable.
assert event.old_value == 0.72 and event.new_value == 0.66
assert event.reason == reason and event.actor == "model"
assert out["previous"] == 0.72 and out["applied"] == 0.66
assert out["clamped"] is False
@pytest.mark.asyncio
@pytest.mark.parametrize("dial, sent, applied", [
("floor", 1.4, 1.0),
("floor", -0.2, 0.0),
("budget", 99, 10),
("budget", 0, 1),
])
async def test_a_clamp_is_reported_rather_than_swallowed(dial, sent, applied):
"""Said out loud, because silence here poisons the next reading.
A caller that believes it set 1.4 treats the following week's telemetry as
evidence about a bar that never existed, and then moves the dial again to
fix a problem it invented.
"""
session, ctx = _patches()
reason = "checked the refused records for this surface and they were fine"
with ctx[0], ctx[1], ctx[2], ctx[3]:
out = await rt.set_dial(1, "auto_inject", dial, sent, reason=reason)
assert out["applied"] == applied
assert out["clamped"] is True
@pytest.mark.asyncio
async def test_an_unknown_surface_is_refused_before_anything_is_written():
session, ctx = _patches()
with ctx[0], patch.object(rt, "set_setting", AsyncMock()) as setter, \
ctx[2], ctx[3]:
with pytest.raises(ValueError):
await rt.set_dial(1, "pretool_rule", "floor", 0.6,
reason="a perfectly good reason that is long enough")
setter.assert_not_called()
session.add.assert_not_called()
@pytest.mark.asyncio
@pytest.mark.parametrize("dial", ["threshold", "limit", "", "FLOOR"])
async def test_an_unknown_dial_is_refused(dial):
"""The near-misses are the old vocabulary — `threshold` and `limit` are what
these were called before this step, so they are exactly what a stale caller
will send, and a silent no-op there would be indistinguishable from a
change that did not take."""
session, ctx = _patches()
with ctx[0], ctx[1], ctx[2], ctx[3], pytest.raises(ValueError):
await rt.set_dial(1, "auto_inject", dial, 0.6,
reason="a perfectly good reason that is long enough")
session.add.assert_not_called()
@pytest.mark.asyncio
async def test_a_human_change_is_distinguishable_from_the_models():
"""Both act as the same user, so the id cannot tell them apart — and "did I
do this, or did the session?" is the first question the history is asked."""
session, ctx = _patches()
with ctx[0], ctx[1], ctx[2], ctx[3]:
await rt.set_dial(1, "auto_inject", "floor", 0.6, actor="human",
reason="operator set this themselves in Settings")
assert session.add.call_args.args[0].actor == "human"
@pytest.mark.asyncio
async def test_an_unknown_actor_is_refused():
"""Free text here would make the column unreadable within a month."""
session, ctx = _patches()
with ctx[0], ctx[1], ctx[2], ctx[3], pytest.raises(ValueError):
await rt.set_dial(1, "auto_inject", "floor", 0.6, actor="agent",
reason="a perfectly good reason that is long enough")
def test_the_tool_teaches_reading_the_records_not_the_percentile():
"""The contract an agent actually reads (rule 167).
The failure this prevents is a model moving a bar because `near_misses.p90`
sat close to it. That has been measured pointing the wrong way — 69 declines
where every percentile said "lower it" and the refused record was a false
positive — so the docstring has to carry the method, not just the warning.
"""
from scribe.mcp.tools import retrieval_tuning as tool
doc = tool.tune_retrieval.__doc__
assert "near_miss_samples" in doc, "the tool does not name how to get records"
assert "PERCENTILE ALONE" in doc.upper()
# And the worked example, because an abstract warning loses to a number.
assert "69" in doc
def test_all_three_tools_are_registered():
from scribe.mcp.tools import retrieval_tuning as tool
from tests.helpers import FakeMCP
mcp = FakeMCP()
tool.register(mcp)
assert mcp.names == [
"retrieval_surfaces", "tune_retrieval", "retrieval_tuning_history",
]