Get answers you can trust

Summary#

The most reliable way to get an answer from Trove today is to ask for it explicitly: tell your agent to search your Trove library. A trustworthy answer comes from pages the agent read, with a citation for each claim. Where books disagree or have no answer, the agent should say so and ask you.

Want your agent to follow these practices? Ask it: "Read How to Use Trove in my Trove library and follow it."

Ask your agent explicitly to search your library#

Tell your agent what you want in plain words, and name your Trove library:

Search my Trove library for how we handle retries.

That request starts the librarian. The librarian looks at your whole library, your shelf and the tables of contents. It picks the books and the pages. It then starts the readers on its own. You do not start readers yourself, and you do not need to choose the books.

Trove also has automatic checks (Auto mode and plan mode). We are actively working on making the librarian start automatically and reliably. Today you should not rely on that. When the answer matters, ask explicitly.

Check that the agent read the pages#

The value of Trove is the exact text. A title, a description or a summary loses detail and can be wrong. So look for a citation such as (Book Title, p. 12) after each claim. To check one, ask your agent to show you the page:

Show me the text of page 12 of that book.

See Citations.

If an answer names a book but gives no page, ask the agent to read the pages and cite them.

When books disagree, ask to see both#

Two books can say different things. You decide which source is the authority, so a silent choice by the agent hides the conflict. Ask to see both sides:

Two of my books may disagree on this. Show me both with page citations, say which is newer, recommend one and ask me.

If a book is out of date, the citation tells you which page to fix.

When no book covers the topic, expect to be told#

If your library has no answer, the agent should say so. It should not invent a rule. An invented rule that looks like a book rule is worse than no answer.

The reader ends its work with a COVERAGE: line. The value none or not-in-library means no book answered. If the librarian found a marketplace book, it offers it, and nothing is added without your yes. If a book covers the topic but misses one part, ask your agent to report the gap to the author of the book. See Knowledge gaps.

Be careful with a confident answer that has no citation. Do not treat it as a book answer.

Direct CLI#

Your agent runs these through the trove command. You can run them yourself in a terminal, but asking your agent is the recommended way: it picks the right flags, waits for processing and checks the result.

See the CLI reference.

Related#

• Citations explains the inline citation and the citation block.
• Item reader shows how pages are read and how the coverage line works.
• Librarian shows how books and depth are chosen.
• Research a topic walks through a full question.