Lesson 7 · 10 min
Context debugging and observability
See exactly what the model receives, measure context utilization, and diagnose quality degradation from context issues.
The model only knows what you put in front of it (redux)
Context bugs are among the hardest to diagnose because the model doesn't tell you "I didn't have that information" — it either confidently hallucinates or gives a subtly wrong answer.
Common context bugs:
- Missing content — you thought you included document X; it was truncated or never retrieved
- Wrong content — the retriever pulled a semantically similar but factually different document
- Stale content — the cached version of a document is 3 months old
- Misplaced content — the most critical information landed in the "lost in the middle" zone