Capstone: A Production-Ready Research Agent

Deliverable

Build a research assistant for an approved document set. It accepts a question, retrieves evidence, drafts a cited answer, asks for approval before any export, and stores a redacted trace. It never writes to an external system by default.

Readiness checklist

Include an architecture diagram, tool contracts, authorization matrix, data-retention table, evaluation dataset, trace example, incident response path, and rollback switch. Release only to a small internal group first.

Acceptance tests

The agent must answer supported questions with citations, abstain when evidence is missing, respect document permissions, refuse injected instructions, stop after its tool budget, and preserve a useful trace for each result.

Practice:

Run the complete acceptance set twice: once with valid evidence and once with a deliberately injected document. Compare the traces, document every failed control, and define the smallest change that closes each gap.

Reflection

Write what a human reviewer remains responsible for. If that cannot be stated clearly, the agent has too much autonomy or too little operational design.