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Ask the archive
Ask a question and get an answer synthesized from The Stack Stories' published editorial corpus, with citations back to the source articles. Grounded in what we've published — refuses when the archive doesn't cover a topic.
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How this works
How does 'Ask the Archive' work?
You type a question. The tool runs a Postgres full-text ranking against every published article to find the top matches, and passes those passages to a language model that composes a synthesized answer citing the sources it used. Every claim in the answer traces to a specific source article — you can click the citation chips to open the source in a new tab.
Will the tool make things up?
The system prompt explicitly instructs the model to only answer from the retrieved passages and to say so plainly when the archive doesn't cover a question. Grounding is not perfect, but the failure mode is 'the archive doesn't have that' rather than fabricated general-knowledge chit-chat.
Why don't the answers include external sources?
This tool synthesizes from The Stack Stories' own editorial coverage only. If the archive cites external primary sources in a passage — which most of our authority pieces do — those references appear in the source article you're linked back to. This tool doesn't reach out to the open web.
Which model powers the answers?
Primary: Gemini 2.5 Flash via OpenRouter. Fallback: Llama 3.3 70B via Groq. Retrieval is Postgres full-text search across title, subtitle, excerpt, and article body with tf-idf-style ranking.
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