Prompts and workflows

ask takes the question and, optionally, whatever the user pasted as context. The server reads that output itself, with no model involved:

• perf stat in its plain, -x and -j forms, per-CPU and interval output included: the counters as read, and the ratios computed from them (instructions per cycle, frequency, branch, cache and TLB miss rates, misses per thousand instructions, stalled-cycle shares, faults and context switches per second), each with its formula, computed as perf computes its own columns. P-core and E-core counts on hybrid parts are never divided by each other.
• Top-down level 1 from perf stat --topdown, -M TopdownL1, the AMD PipelineL1 group, or toplev, and level 2 from -M TopdownL2. A level is flagged only against a threshold a listed source states: Intel's own values from its TMA metrics sheet, applied only to Intel P-cores and cited with every flag. Everything else is reported as measured, without a verdict. A flagged level sends the answer to the part of the list about it: a memory-bound run to the memory hierarchy, a front-end-bound one to fetch and decode.
• The machine: when the PMUs and event names show Intel, AMD or Arm, sources about the other vendors' hardware and tools are left out.
• How far to trust it: multiplexed counters (and the lowest running share, metric groups included), events that were not counted or not supported, how many -I intervals were summed, and lines the parser could not read, which are listed rather than guessed.
• perf's own errors: a missing metric group, perf_event_paranoid refusals, unknown or unsupported events, the NMI watchdog: each restated with what perf itself says to do, instead of being searched for word by word.
• gcc -fopt-info and clang -Rpass remarks: why each loop was left scalar, counted per loop, routed to the list's auto-vectorisation sources and benchmark.
• Assembly and code: objdump -d with or without the opcode bytes, gdb's disassemble, perf annotate, and source code. The instructions and identifiers that matter (gathers, atomics, fences, intrinsics, alignas, restrict) are routed to the matching sections, and so is what a loop does: a float sum carried across iterations, which stays one serial chain of adds without -fassociative-math even when a remark says the loop was vectorised (and packed multiplies feeding a run of scalar adds, its shape in assembly), an early exit, or fields read from an array of structs.

The event names, remarks and identifiers then steer the search, so the passages that come back are about the pasted output, not just the question.

Every answer says which of the list's sources it carries text from and which it does not. Each entry is marked as quoted (with the passages and pages), in the library but without a matching passage (with the read_source call that looks inside), or not read on this machine (with the reason: blocked, refused by a proxy, not fetched yet, a talk with only its description). The model is told to attribute a claim to a source only through a passage it was given, and to offer an unread source as further reading, never as a citation. A listed paper the question is about comes with its abstract, and every passage carries the list's title for its source rather than the document's own, which is often a placeholder such as "Untitled Document".

Answers are brief by default: passages are trimmed to the part that matches, the benchmark and the editorial record come only when they are relevant, and each passage carries an id that read_source(ref, passage=id) expands in full. detail="full" returns whole passages and everything related. Repeated questions are answered from a cache until the library changes.