P2 · ACT WITH TOOLS UNDER BUDGET

An agent that stops, and can tell you which rule stopped it.

LIVEv1.0.0 · main 1b4915f · CI greenVerified 2026-08-14

A plan → retrieve → critique loop where the budget lives in state rather than in the prompt, so termination is a property of the program instead of a request to the model. Every run ends in a typed status — done, refused, budget_exhausted, capability_missing, backend_unavailable — and emits a deterministic trace of six event types ending in stop. Hire this if you have been burned by an agent that ran until someone noticed.

Run a research loop in the browser Read the source

HOSTED · no clone, no key

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

No clone, no key. Ask a question the fixture cannot support and read the typed refuse. Hosted health reports version 1.0.0; GET /health and GET /metrics both returned 200 on 2026-08-14.

LIVE

Every line here is backed by a test, a route, or a file in the repository at v1.0.0 · main 1b4915f · CI green.

Plan → retrieve → critique loop with a retrieval budget and a no-repeat bound held in ResearchState.
Typed terminal statuses, with refusal and dependency failure kept apart: a missing backend is backend_unavailable, never an evidence refusal.
A complete deterministic trace of six event types ending in stop, exportable from the API and from the result page.
POST /v1/research, a CLI, GET /health, and GET /metrics in Prometheus text — all four verified over HTTP on the hosted instance.
A 17-case golden evaluation across five slices, run with empty provider variables.
An optional production-rag HTTP retriever, opt-in behind PRODUCTION_RAG_URL and mock-transport tested.
Stored run artifacts with GET /v1/runs, SSE stream, and smoke-tested download offsets at main 1b4915f (fixture-only on the hosted copy).

NOT SHIPPED

The boundary, stated before you find it yourself. Nothing below is presented as built, hidden in a footnote, or described as coming soon.

The hosted demo runs the committed fixture retriever. It proves the agent's control flow and claims nothing about retrieval or answer quality.
No PRODUCTION_RAG_URL is set on the hosted instance, so the HTTP retriever there fails with a typed capability_missing by design rather than falling back.
No paired agent-uplift measurement against a single-pass baseline. That is the next quality boundary, and it has not been run.
No model-based planner, auth, rate limiting, streaming, multi-tenancy, load figure, or arbitrary web or write tool.
The optional HTTP adapter is mock-transport tested; this release claims no live cross-service measurement.

Capture

One image from the repository at the commit named in the caption.

Agentic Research UI showing a completed run with its stop reason and cited synthesis — A completed research run: budget spent, stop reason, cited synthesis. Source file

INTERVIEW THIS SYSTEM

Three questions worth asking, and the answers I would give.

Published in advance, because a trade-off I can only defend when nobody has read it first is not a trade-off I understand.

01
Why does the step budget live in state instead of in the system prompt?
A prompt-level budget is a request the model may decline. A state-level budget is a loop invariant the model cannot see or argue with, so termination is testable without invoking a model at all.
02
Why is an unreachable backend not a refusal?
Refusal is a claim about evidence: the corpus does not support an answer. An unreachable backend is a claim about infrastructure. Collapsing the two teaches an operator to ignore refusals, and hides the outage.
03
What does a 17-case fixture evaluation actually prove?
Control-flow conformance: that each slice reaches the terminal status the contract says it should. It is plumbing evidence. Anyone reading it as a retrieval quality number is reading a claim the harness explicitly refuses to make.

READ THE PRIMARY SOURCES

Everything above is a summary of a file you can open.

The case study explains why the system is shaped this way; SHIP is the LIVE and not-shipped contract this page is derived from.

An agent that stops, and can tell you which rule stopped it.

LIVE

NOT SHIPPED

Capture

Three questions worth asking, and the answers I would give.

Why does the step budget live in state instead of in the system prompt?

Why is an unreachable backend not a refusal?

What does a 17-case fixture evaluation actually prove?

Everything above is a summary of a file you can open.