Forty-five minutes, five systems

The rules of the room

What holds for every beat

Nothing here reads a key. Every command and every link on this page runs on the free path. If a step asks for a credential, the step is wrong, not the reviewer's setup.

Every beat ends in a result I did not choose. A refusal, a budget_exhausted, a typed 401, four unconfigured upstreams. A demo that only shows success is a demo that has not been tested.

The boundary is volunteered, not extracted. Each beat carries the sentence I say before a reviewer has to ask for it. Volunteering the limit is the difference between a portfolio and a pitch.

Day-of checklist. Five portfolio hosts (plus this site and selected work) are curled from content/verified-urls.json. Run it before the call. A red check means the script on this page is lying until you refresh the fixture.

npm run verify:urls

Minute 0–8 · Production RAG · CLONE · main 3b54d85

Grounded, then refusing, then narrowed · main 3b54d85 · CLONE

Open with the thesis in one breath. Main is 3b54d85 / v1.0.0; stream, filter-aware cache, and /evals are on main. Ask grounded, refuse, then title = Filtering. DEMO-DAY lives in the clone.

git clone https://github.com/pabloalvarez99/production-rag && cd production-rag && ./scripts/demo_setup.sh

One command starts Qdrant, rebuilds the demo collection with the deterministic embedder, and serves the UI on :8000. Prepared before the call, not inside the forty-five minutes.

Ask Why does hybrid search use reciprocal rank fusion? Click a citation marker. It resolves to the exact chunk that was in the prompt context.

Ask Who won the Antarctic underwater chess championship? An explicit refusal that states its reason, with no invented supporting text.

Ask How does filtering work in Qdrant? — asked twice, the second time with the metadata filter set to title = Filtering The result footer carries a Filtered: title = Filtering chip. One question asked twice, so the narrowing is visible rather than taken on trust.

Open Study Production RAG before the call. The page states what this system does not do, including that it has no auth and no rate limiting.

Open DEMO-DAY + /evals in the repo. Clone card only: stream path, Filtering chip, and scorecard live in-repo. Never open production-rag.vercel.app (Ipsura).

Watch for: Do not present the deterministic run as retrieval or answer quality — the embedder, the LLM, and the reranker are fakes. Do not present the field allowlist as access control: it bounds which fields a query may filter on, never which documents a caller may see.

Minute 8–18 · Agentic Research · HOSTED · main 1b4915f

A loop that stops for a stated reason · 1b4915f · pax-agentic-rag.vercel.app

Hosted at pax-agentic-rag.vercel.app on main 1b4915f / v1.0.0. Ask a supported question, then an unsupported one, and read stop_reason.

Open Open the hosted research agent. No clone and no key. Ask, then expand the trace: plan_created, tool_call, tool_result, critique, synthesize, stop.

Ask What does hybrid retrieval buy over dense retrieval alone? The loop completes. Read the steps used against the configured maximum.

Ask What were the quarterly revenues in Patagonia? The loop refuses: empty citations and populated gaps naming what was looked for and not found.

curl https://pax-agentic-rag.vercel.app/metrics

Prometheus text: process_up, requests_total, research_total, research_steps_used_total. Verified 200.

Watch for: Do not claim the agent beats a single retrieval pass; the scorecard measures contract conformance, not uplift. Do not imply the P1 HTTP retriever is running — the hosted instance sets no PRODUCTION_RAG_URL, so that path answers capability_missing on purpose.

Minute 18–28 · Multi-Agent Orchestration · HOSTED · main 88a24f2

Writer-only, and degraded on purpose — now in the browser · 88a24f2 · pax-orchestration.vercel.app

Hosted at pax-orchestration.vercel.app on main 88a24f2 / v1.0.0. Run a task and download the JSON; specialists are fakes.

Open Open the hosted specialist console. No clone and no key. Submit a task and read the ordered handoff timeline aloud.

curl https://pax-orchestration.vercel.app/health

Open with no header: 200 and {"status":"ok"}. Verified 2026-08-14.

curl -s -X POST https://pax-orchestration.vercel.app/v1/tasks -H "content-type: application/json" -d '{"task":"Audit retrieval risk","budget":{"max_handoffs":8}}'

Read status, stop_reason, and agents_involved. A completed free-path run ends in writer_final with the Writer as result_author.

Open Study Multi-Agent Orchestration. Its own non-goals are on the page, starting with the one that matters: no claim that several agents outperform one.

Watch for: Do not claim answer quality or multi-model uplift; the specialists are deterministic fakes. Do not claim the optional remote research integration is live unless AGENTIC_RAG_URL is set — the free path does not need it.

Minute 28–38 · RepoMind · HOSTED · main 24ece08

path:line, and the snapshot caveat · 24ece08 · pax-repomind.vercel.app

Citations as path:start-end, not prose references. Open one — it is a real range in a real file. Then say the honesty beat before anyone asks: the production_rag catalog is a frozen snapshot committed under fixtures, not a live checkout of the sibling project. It proves navigation and citation correctness on committed bytes. It does not prove the tool works on your repository.

Open A hit: where is create_app defined?. Answers app/main.py lines 6-9. The console asks with GET, so this link is the demo.

Open Where is create_app defined? on production_rag. Primary interview hit on main 24ece08. Name the host pax-repomind.vercel.app and the SHA.

Open The refusal. No evidence found, zero citations. Same code path as the answer.

curl -X POST https://pax-repomind.vercel.app/v1/code/ask -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"question":"Where is create_app defined?","repo_id":"production_rag"}'

On main 24ece08 the catalog accepts production_rag for POST as well as GET. Say the SHA and the host out loud.

Watch for: Do not describe the dogfood gate as evidence of general code comprehension. Do not imply the snapshot tracks the sibling repository — it does not update itself. Do not quote eval counts as a score.

Minute 38–45 · AI Platform · HOSTED · main 801fc0b

Rejected, then unconfigured · 801fc0b · pax-ai-gateway.vercel.app

Gateway on main 801fc0b / v1.0.0 at pax-ai-gateway.vercel.app. Status with the public fixture key reports four unconfigured upstreams.

curl https://pax-ai-gateway.vercel.app/health

Open with no header: 200 and {"status":"ok","service":"gateway"}.

Open The same route without a key — a typed 401. The error names the failure type and carries a request id, and it leaks nothing about what is behind the edge.

curl -H "X-API-Key: dev-local" https://pax-ai-gateway.vercel.app/v1/platform/status

200, gateway up, and rag / research / mao / repomind all unconfigured. dev-local is a public fixture committed to the repository, not a credential — say that plainly.

Open Open the status console and close on it. Four upstreams, all unconfigured. The honest close of the whole demo.

Watch for: Do not say P5 hosts, runs, or serves P1 through P4. Do not call dev-local a key, a secret, or a credential. The rate limiter is an in-process fixed window per isolate on serverless, so do not present its advertised limit as a global guarantee.

Close

Three sentences that end the call

Every system runs for free, deterministically, without a credential — which is why CI can run the whole path and a reviewer can reproduce it.

Every system can return a result its author would not have chosen: a refusal, a degraded outcome, a no_evidence stop, an unconfigured upstream.

Every number published anywhere in the series carries what produced it, and where a number would flatter without support, the repository says so instead.

DEMO-DAY.md at 3b54d85 may still describe localhost-first ports for the flagship free path. Four systems are hosted now (P2–P5). This page is the re-cut for the portfolio hosts. P1 stays clone-only; PR #3 is merged on main 3b54d85. Never cite production-rag.vercel.app (Ipsura).