Field documentation · the stack
How we built this.
Most product pages tell you about the features. This one tells you about the foundations. The decisions we made before we wrote a line of customer-facing code; the picks we'd defend if you asked; the picks we're honest about wanting to revisit.
The Detective is built by two founders. There is no team behind the team. What follows is the stack we'd hand a friend asking how to build something like this, with the tradeoffs labelled.
The stack.
The methodology page links directly to the production code paths for the runner pipeline. The repo itself is currently private; open-sourcing the runner is on the post-PMF roadmap.
Four principles the code enforces.
- If we cannot ground a claim, we do not make it.
- Every claim in every report is anchored to a real source URL. The pipeline is built so a hallucinated citation cannot leave the synthesis stage — not because the agent is asked nicely, because the schema rejects unbound claims.
- We refuse rather than fabricate.
- When the public evidence on a niche is too thin to support a verdict, the runner aborts the spend, surfaces three salvage angles, and adds a free re-run credit to your account. A confident wrong answer is worse than an honest refusal.
- We name what is low-confidence.
- Sources are tagged primary, industry, media, or low. The viewer downweights low-confidence dots visibly. The verdict can come out Preliminary instead of GO. We never quietly lower the bar to ship a result.
- We cap the budget before we spend it.
- Hard ceiling per analysis at the runner. The cap exists so a runaway prompt can never silently turn into a four-figure mistake against a two-figure subscription. The cap is set high enough that an honest analysis never hits it.
The decisions we made.
The chapter on the picks we'd defend if you asked. The preflight gate, the credit-then-refund ladder, the source tier tagging. Each one started as a meeting between us; this section will tell you how each meeting went.
Field notes in progress
What we'd change.
The honest list of the picks we'd revisit if we were starting from scratch tomorrow. No vendor was harmed in the making of this section; this is about our taste evolving, not their service degrading.
Field notes in progress
Want to see the pipeline run?
The methodology page walks through the five stages a real analysis goes through. The /sample report shows the output shape end to end. The intake form is the front door.