THE PROBLEM
Engineering knowledge is not a search result. It is context that can be defended.
Real questions cross repositories, architecture notes, ownership, and current infrastructure state. Vector search alone misses exact paths and fresh runtime signals.
RelayOps starts with reproducible prefetch, allows a bounded read-only investigation, then applies citation checks, confidence caps, secret gates, and abstention.
SANITISED WALKTHROUGH
One engineering question, from retrieval to a visible unknown.
This example follows evaluation and QA-history fields. Internal repository, path, and service identifiers are removed.
natural language, typo and follow-up tolerant
a reproducible candidate set
bounded budget; no mutation capability
invalid citations are removed; weak evidence triggers a cap or abstention
environment-specific approver mapping remains unknown
Approval occurs after policy validation and before execution. The request includes the proposed action, scope, and rollback plan. Publicly available evidence does not establish the approver mapping for a specific environment, so the service owner must verify that detail.
SOURCES · approval-flow.md · policy-gates.md · live snapshot (read-only)SAFETY MODEL
“Read-only” is a capability boundary, not a sentence in the prompt.
No mutating tools
Least-privilege infrastructure access sets a hard ceiling on what the agent can do.
Redaction at several layers
High-risk resources and sensitive tool output are filtered before the final answer.
Claims must remain traceable
The verifier checks that cited evidence appeared in the current investigation.
“I do not know” is a feature
Conflicting, stale, or absent evidence becomes an explicit unknown and safe next step.
WHAT THE EVIDENCE SUPPORTS
Traceability is measurable. User impact still needs a publishable baseline.
Citation validity in the same controlled evaluation set.
False confidence for the hybrid architecture in adversarial cases.
Average tool calls, compared with approximately 8.4 for open exploration.
Time saved, answer adoption, and correct-abstention rate are not publicly claimed yet.
REQUEST A WALKTHROUGH
Want to see citations, abstention, and the audit trail working together?
RELATED SHIPPED CASE