An app must answer a customer's delivery date for one order. Where should that fact come from?
Why B is the answer
A table lookup keyed by order
Per-record facts belong in structured storage. Policies and fine-tuning cannot give one order's date.
In detail
- A delivery date belongs to one specific order.
- That fact lives in structured data, so look it up by key.
- Use retrieval for general knowledge, and lookups for facts about one record.
Use case
An illustrative scenario, not a real incident.
A retailer's bot is asked when order 7741 arrives. Shipping policy documents cannot say. A lookup by order number returns the actual date.
See it in different ways
flowchart TD
A{"What kind of knowledge?"} -->|"Policies and manuals"| B["Vector Search"]
A -->|"Facts for one order or customer"| C["Lookup by key in a table"]
A -->|"Live values"| D["A tool call"]sequenceDiagram
participant U as User
participant A as Agent
participant I as Vector index
participant T as Tool
U->>A: Question
alt General policy
A->>I: Search documents
I-->>A: Passages
else Live or per-record fact
A->>T: Call with a key
T-->>A: Current value
end
A-->>U: Answerflowchart TD
Q{"What is being asked?"}
Q -->|"General policy"| A0["Vector search"]
Q -->|"One order"| A1["Table lookup by key"]
Q -->|"Changes by the minute"| A2["Tool call"]Key point: Facts about one record come from a table.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. A prompt telling the model to estimate a date
- An estimate is not a fact, and the customer needs the real date.
- C. A vector index of general shipping policies
- General policies do not hold one order's date.
- D. A fine-tuned model trained on last year's orders
- Last year's orders cannot tell you about this order.