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23 changes: 23 additions & 0 deletions docs/engineering-decisions.md
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# 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.
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