Lesson 4: Conversations, page images, long contexts and live data
27 min read·13 Oct 2026
Module 10 · Lesson 4 · About 50 minutes · Needs: Module 7 Lesson 1 (condensing a follow-up), Module 5 Lesson 3 (permission filters) and Module 9 Lesson 4 (untrusted sources)
The situation
Ellie Shaw's chat on Friday 9 October 2026 does not fit the pipeline from Modules 2 to 9. That pipeline answers one question from one text index. Ellie's "Is it covered?" only means something after her earlier turns, and her next message, "Where is it now?", is about a repair whose status lives in the case database.
Hannah asks about manuals that exist only as scanned pages; Owen asks why Hollin retrieves at all when the corpus is small. This lesson covers patterns that change where the knowledge lives. The Hollin data is simulated.