citations

Citations are the trust interface of enterprise RAG, and the easiest thing to fake badly. Covers inline citation generation, span verification, and the verification-rate metric that interviewers actually want.

Harvey's signature design question. The twist: the architecture is the easy half. The graded half is designing for reviewer trust, where one hallucinated clause costs more than a hundred correct ones earn.

Slides are the worst RAG corpus: text in shapes, meaning in charts, the message in the image. A query like 'the blue bar chart with Q3 revenue' fails if you embed only the extracted text, and citing the wrong slide number kills trust instantly.

Deep-research agents run unsupervised for twenty minutes and their report goes straight to an executive. The failure mode is not a crash, it is confident citations that do not support the claims. Most candidates design the retrieval and skip the verification pass, the run budget, and the freshness story.

The signature coding problem at a legal-AI company, and it is interval merging wearing a product costume. The candidates who struggle are the ones who start matching before deciding what a match even is.