Feature plan: Step 1 · Step 2 · Step 3 · Step 4

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Scripture Response Reliability — Solution Assessment

Original Query

That would be a great answer. How do we change our feature so that this would have been the case?

Revised Direction

The user selected gpt-5-mini and explicitly authorized switching from nano. The shared private LLM_MODEL setting is now mini; configuration validation passed. This selection does not establish measured answer quality or approve the remaining reliability changes.

Understood Intent

Make the feature reliably produce the judgment demonstrated in the approved answer to the departure-time post: distinguish actual deadlines from planned tasks, help the reader choose a responsible stopping point, and connect relevant scripture without turning the concern into a devotional survey. Preserve warranted depth, accurate quotations, optional expansion, and prompt visible completion.

Problem Statement

The current writer disregards existing scope and quotation guidance often enough that prompt instructions and lower reasoning alone cannot establish reliable quality.

Evidence

The completed comparison found 6/16 quality passes with revised guidance and 5/16 with low reasoning; both had critical quotation errors. Low reasoning reduced completed-sample median latency to 8.94 seconds from 27.80 seconds, but one trial was interrupted. A more capable writer was not evaluated. The current prompt already prohibits catalogues and unsupported follow-up offers.

Option A — Stronger writer centered on the reader's concern

Evaluate the user-selected gpt-5-mini for scripture replies and expansions. Make resolving the actual concern its primary objective; scripture supplies relevant understanding and reasons. For practical questions, identify the decision and constraints without inventing emotional or spiritual problems. Interpretive questions receive the requested context and competing readings.

• Pros: Targets the missing editorial judgment while retaining a single writing call and the verified delivery path.

• Cons: Better behavior and acceptable latency remain hypotheses; model memory can still produce inaccurate quotations.

Option B — Stronger writer with verified quotations

Combine A with a bounded source-verification path: displayed verbatim wording and translation labels must agree with verified passage text. Clearly distinguish paraphrase, interpretation, and analogy. Unavailable source text must not become an invented quotation or a silently substituted translation.

• Pros: Addresses editorial quality and directly demonstrated quotation failures separately.

• Cons: Source availability, translation coverage, context handling, and useful recovery need explicit decisions. Matching wording cannot establish faithful interpretation.

Option C — Bounded editorial revision

Add a separate editorial pass that can rebuild a draft around the original concern, retaining only passages and explanation that change understanding or action. Evaluate the final answer, including any quotation changes, before publication.

• Pros: Can correct misplaced emphasis and repetition that survive the writer's instructions.

• Cons: Adds waiting, cost, and recovery complexity; the editor can repeat the writer's errors. It requires its own measured comparison.

Recommendation

Proceed with B, testing A's stronger writer as the single-call foundation. Keep C as a fallback if that foundation still fails. This explicitly reopens the previous plan's exclusion of a verified-source component; it does not authorize implementation yet.

• Treat the approved departure answer as a reference for judgment, not a mandatory template, word limit, or verse quota. Keep it and prior failures as visible regressions; freeze fresh held-out cases for selection.

• Define the supported quotation sources, requested-translation behavior, and unavailable/mismatched-source recovery before implementation. Do not silently patch passages in ways that change the surrounding claim.

• Deliver a complete vertical slice through existing request, publication, Expand, and explicit recovery paths. Preserve historical replies, permissions, moderation, and unrelated modes.

• Fix candidate identities, repeated initial/expansion cases, source checks, joint quality/latency gates, and a new call/spend budget before paid trials. The prior budget does not renew automatically. Keep failed/interrupted calls and verify anonymous review and full timing capture with stubs first.