From 18a4a8ee004adca6e8b110db1833f791daa8ba60 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Corey Leath Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2026 14:09:06 -0400 Subject: [PATCH] docs: add project-specific engineering decisions and evidence policy --- docs/engineering-decisions.md | 23 +++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 23 insertions(+) create mode 100644 docs/engineering-decisions.md diff --git a/docs/engineering-decisions.md b/docs/engineering-decisions.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..218fc9b --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/engineering-decisions.md @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +# Engineering Decisions & Trade-offs + +## End-to-end system story +TrojanChat should be evaluated as a complete interaction pipeline: user input, prompt/context construction, model invocation, response handling, observability, and user-facing delivery. + +## Key trade-offs +- **Context depth vs. latency and cost:** Larger context windows can improve continuity while increasing inference time and token usage. +- **Helpfulness vs. hallucination risk:** More open-ended generation can feel useful but requires stronger grounding, validation, and failure handling. +- **Feature breadth vs. reliability:** Additional tools and integrations expand capability while increasing the number of dependencies and failure modes. +- **Convenience vs. privacy:** Conversation logging and analytics improve debugging but require explicit data-handling boundaries. + +## Failure modes to test +- Provider timeouts, rate limits, and malformed responses +- Missing or invalid credentials +- Oversized context and token-budget exhaustion +- Unsafe, unsupported, or fabricated answers +- Partial failures in logging, retrieval, or downstream integrations + +## Evidence policy +Only measured results should be described as completed. Targets, demonstrations, simulations, and planned capabilities must be labeled clearly. Evaluation reports should record model/provider version, environment, test cases, sample count, methodology, and limitations. + +## Clean-clone validation +A reviewer should be able to clone the repository, configure documented environment variables, run tests, and start a representative local or demo path without undocumented files or manual patches.