How a brief is made

Each query fans out across source classes chosen for the question, not a fixed list: search engines, GitHub issues and discussions, official docs and changelogs, Reddit, Hacker News, YouTube transcripts, and papers.

Recency is a ranking signal, not a filter. An authoritative older source beats a fresh low-signal one — but every source carries its date into the brief.

No claim enters a brief on one source's word. Claims are cross-checked across independent sources; a claim that appears in only one place is either dropped or explicitly attributed as a single-source claim.

Disagreement is content. When credible sources conflict, the brief says so and shows both positions with dates, instead of silently picking the majority.

Every brief follows the same structure:

• a bottom line of 40–60 words whose first word is the direct answer,
• inline [n] markers on every factual claim,
• a sources list with title, URL, date, and source type for every marker,
• an as-of date stamping when the research was done.

A claim that can't be cited doesn't ship. There is no fifth rule.

Before a brief is returned, it's scored against four questions:

• Direct — does the first sentence answer the question asked?
• Current — is the most recent relevant development represented?
• Grounded — does every claim trace to a listed source?
• Honest — are disagreements and unknowns stated rather than smoothed over?

The bound is the product: a brief targets ~500 tokens. Token counts are computed on the returned brief_md text and included in every API response, so the number on your bill and the number in your context window are the same number.

Benchmark comparisons count tokens the same way on both sides — the raw pages a WebSearch + WebFetch workflow would have loaded versus the brief. The harness, prompts, and tokenizer are published in the public evals repo so every published number is reproducible.

Briefs are researched live at request time — nothing is answered from a stale cache unless the cache entry is younger than the volatility of the topic. Every brief carries its as of date, and public briefs can be regenerated on demand.