Skip to content

docs(skill): surface site:/operator search limitations instead of silently reformulating #16

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Merged
juniperbevensee merged 1 commit into from
Jun 30, 2026
Merged

docs(skill): surface site:/operator search limitations instead of silently reformulating #16

Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
1 commit
Select commit
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
16 changes: 16 additions & 0 deletions hermes-skill/SKILL.md
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -53,6 +53,19 @@ so another researcher (or a future session) could resume without you.
Collect candidate sources and claims. Prefer authoritative, open sources. Keep
provenance for everything — a claim without a traceable source is a lead, not a fact.

**Web-search honesty.** When you search the open web (via the runtime's search
tools) and a query using an operator — `site:`, `filetype:`, quoted exact-phrase,
etc. — returns no results, or results with no usable snippets, **say so
explicitly**: e.g. "could not retrieve snippets for `site:nature.com …` — the
search backend may not support that operator." Then, if you broaden or reformulate
the query (drop the operator, loosen the phrasing), do it as a **visible, stated
step** — "no snippets for the `site:` query; retrying without the operator" —
**never as a silent swap**. Quietly dropping an operator and re-querying hides a
real limitation of the search backend behind a result that looks complete; for a
citations tool, the limitation *is* the finding. Surfacing "the backend ignored
this operator" is more useful than a clean-looking answer built on a query you
silently changed.

### Phase 3: Verify (the core)

Run every citation through the four-axis check:
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -165,6 +178,9 @@ the package's smoke test; imitate its shape when judging a real result. See
- **Never fabricate** a citation, result, dataset, or quotation. Unknown is a valid answer.
- **Never inflate** a verifiability score or present an unverified reference as verified.
- **Never hide** a retraction or correction.
- **Never hide a search limitation.** If a web query returns nothing or no
snippets, report it; if you reformulate, state that you did. A silently
reformulated query is a hidden limitation — unknown is a valid answer.
- Do not represent identifiable human-subject data outside a study's scope and ethics approval.
- When in doubt about legality, ethics, or a misconduct claim about a named study, **stop and consult**.

Expand Down
Loading