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MIP-0022: The safety footer — every answer grounded in a safety document ends with lifeguard/193/SAMU 192, appended after the model, never by it
Status Implemented (Phase 0 surfaces: --ask, ask_ocean_question) — merged to main via PR #195 (749ec54); the mip-0022/1-safety-footer branch is now stale/superseded by that squash-merge
Author Claude Fable 5.1, for M. Hoffmann (candidate K6 of the 2026-09-06 external consolidation, docs/4-Research-and-plans/ROADMAP.md §7 — the rule half; the corpus half is the corpus-doc skill, §9)
Created 2026-09-06
Phase 0 (--ask, ask_ocean_question) → 1 (the bot's /perguntar, MIP-0002)
Related MIP-0001 (the curated corpus and its citation rule), core/knowledge/OceanQa.scala (Answer, NoAnswerSentinel, Fallback), core/knowledge/Corpus.scala (CorpusChunk), knowledge/README.md (the "wrong sentence becomes a confidently wrong answer" warning), .claude/skills/corpus-doc/SKILL.md
Effort S — one boolean threaded from the corpus loader to Answer, one pure SafetyFooter renderer called by the three surfaces, specs; no dependency, no prompt change
Gain user value (a first-aid or rip-current answer always ends with who to call)
Effort vs Gain do next — the corpus is about to gain safety documents via corpus-doc; the footer must exist before the first one lands, or the highest-stakes answers ship without it
Depends on nothing for the CLI/MCP surfaces; MIP-0002 for the bot surface. Blocks: the first knowledge/safety/*.md PR should not merge before this does
Risk a footer on every safety answer becomes wallpaper users skip; mitigated by keeping it to two short lines and only on answers actually grounded in a safety document, not on every answer
Cost so far ~$73.38 (measured, scripts/cost-split.py --estimate --json)

1. Summary

When an --ask / ask_ocean_question / /perguntar answer was grounded in a document under knowledge/safety/, the rendered reply ends with a fixed two-line footer, who to call (guarda- vidas / Bombeiros 193, SAMU 192) and "this does not replace professional help", appended by the rendering code after the model's text. The model never sees the footer, cannot rephrase it, and cannot drop it: a test proves it is present even when the model's output already contains a look-alike, and even when the model returned the no-answer sentinel.

2. Motivation

knowledge/README.md already says why the corpus is strict: "a wrong sentence here becomes a confidently wrong answer". Safety documents (rip-current escape, jellyfish first aid — the next corpus-doc additions, docs/4-Research-and-plans/ROADMAP.md §7 K6) raise the stakes from wrong to harmful: a correct paragraph about treating a sting is still not a substitute for calling for help, and a user reading marola on the sand may not know the numbers. Today OceanQa.answer returns the model's text plus the passages it used; nothing in the pipeline knows that a passage was a safety passage, and the only place a footer could come from is the prompt — which puts safety text under the model's control, exactly what MIP-0001's citation rule was written to avoid.

3. User-visible change

$ just ask "what do I do if I'm caught in a rip current?"
Don't fight the current: swim parallel to the shore until you are out of it, then angle back in [1].
If you can't, float and signal for help [1].

⚠️ Em emergência na água: acione os guarda-vidas ou ligue 193 (Bombeiros) / 192 (SAMU).
Esta resposta não substitui socorro profissional.
[1] https://…rip-currents…
  • The footer appears only when at least one used passage came from knowledge/safety/. A question about whale season never gets it.
  • It appears in the language of the surface (pt-BR on the bot, en on the CLI/MCP — the CLI's own convention today), from a fixed string table, not from the model.
  • It is present even when the answer is the strict-mode "no passages cover this" reply to a safety question, so a user who asked about a sting and got no answer still gets the numbers.

4. Data sources and dependencies reviewed

No new source. Emergency numbers: 193 (Corpo de Bombeiros, the service that runs the guarda-vidas in Santa Catarina, CBMSC) and 192 (SAMU) are the national numbers; not fetched for this draft — §11.1 requires the implementing PR to cite the CBMSC/SAMU pages in the string table's comment, the same "verify, don't guess" rule the corpus itself follows.

Code touched (read 2026-09-06): Corpus.chunkDocument/load produce CorpusChunk(docTitle, source, text) from knowledge/*.md — the loader knows the file path, so a directory-based flag costs one field. OceanQa.answer returns Answer(text, passages) and the three surfaces render it: cli/Main.scala:177 (--ask), SwimConditionsMcpServer.scala:258 (ask_ocean_question), and MIP-0002's future handler. OceanQa.NoAnswerSentinel/NoPassagesReply handle the no-answer path; Fallback.General prefixes GeneralKnowledgeLabel — a general-knowledge answer to a safety question is exactly where the footer matters most.

5. Design

Where "safety" is decided: the directory, not a marker. A document is a safety document iff its path is under knowledge/safety/. Reasons: the corpus already keys everything on file layout (# Title + Source: lines, .md in the directory); a front-matter marker would need a parser change and is invisible in ls; a directory is reviewable in a PR's file list and corpus-doc can say "put first-aid docs here" in one sentence. knowledge/README.md gains the rule.

Scala, core/knowledge (deterministic, tested).

  • CorpusChunk gains safety: Boolean; Corpus.load sets it from the relative path (safety/ prefix). The index fingerprint changes (a new field) → one automatic re-embed, as any corpus change causes today.
  • OceanQa.Answer gains safety: Boolean = passages.exists(_.chunk.safety), computed from the passages actually retained after minScore, i.e. the ones the model was shown.
  • object SafetyFooter { enum Lang { PtBr, En }; def render(lang: Lang): String }, a pure string table, two lines, the numbers as literals with a source comment. def append(text: String, safety: Boolean, lang: Lang): String = text when !safety, else text + blank line
  • render(lang). No trimming or matching of the model text: if the model already wrote something footer-like, the real footer still follows — duplicate beats absent.
  • The three surfaces call SafetyFooter.append on answer.text before printing/returning; citations ([n] list) print after the footer on the CLI as today's layout dictates, or the footer is the last block; decided by the golden output in §7, not by taste.
  • The prompt (buildMessages) is unchanged. The model is not told about the footer.

What goes through the LLM: nothing new. The footer is the one string in the reply the model cannot influence.

6. Scoring / safety impact

No change to Swimability. Safety text changes: a fixed, sourced footer is added to answers grounded in safety documents; nothing is removed or reworded. The property to protect is monotonic: from this MIP on, no code path may return a safety-grounded answer without the footer. The spec in §7 is the guard, and corpus-doc's SKILL.md gets a line pointing at it.

7. Verification plan

  • SafetyFooterSpec (pure): append is identity when safety=false; appends exactly render(lang) when true; a text that already ends with the footer's first line still gets the full footer appended (no dedup); render for both langs contains 193 and 192.
  • OceanQaSpec (fake LlmClient, fixture corpus with one safety/ doc and one ordinary doc): a question whose retained passages include the safety doc yields Answer.safety = true; one retained from the ordinary doc only yields false; strict no-answer on a safety question yields NoPassagesReply with safety = true; Fallback.General on a safety question keeps safety = true (the passages were retrieved, the model declined them; the numbers still apply).
  • Golden: --ask output for the rip-current question against the fixture corpus, byte-equal, footer as the last block before citations; the MCP ask_ocean_question result text ends with the footer.
  • corpus-doc skill: one added line — "safety topics go under knowledge/safety/; the footer is automatic (MIP-0022), don't write one into the document".

8. Risks, limitations, and honest caveats

  • Footer fatigue. Two lines, only on safety-grounded answers. If knowledge/safety/ grows to dominate the corpus, most answers will carry it; acceptable, since the alternative is guessing which safety answers don't need it.
  • Retrieval decides, not the question. A safety question whose passages all score below minScore and whose corpus has no safety doc yet gets no footer — the flag follows evidence. Until the first knowledge/safety/ doc lands, the footer never appears; that is why this MIP must merge first, not why it can wait.
  • Language. The CLI is English today and the numbers are Brazilian; the en footer says so ("in Brazil, call…"). A non-Brazil area (site/areas.json has Bahia/Rio — same numbers) is fine; a future non-Brazilian deployment needs its own table row, out of scope.
  • The numbers are literals in code; a change (unlikely for 192/193) is a one-line PR with a source, not a config knob.

9. Alternatives considered

  • Put the footer in the prompt ("always end safety answers with…"). The model can drop, reword or translate it, and a review-pass LLM could strip it as "repetitive". Rejected: safety text under model control is the thing MIP-0001 forbids.
  • Front-matter marker per document instead of a directory. Needs a Corpus parser change, invisible in file listings, easy to forget on a new doc. Rejected for the directory.
  • Footer on every answer. Simpler, but turns the numbers into wallpaper on whale-season questions. Rejected; evidence-gated instead.
  • Make the corpus part of this MIP. No: adding sourced documents is exactly what the corpus-doc skill (MIP-0011 task 8) does, one PR per document with a fetched source; bundling them here would hide safety text inside a plumbing PR. This MIP is the rule those PRs rely on.
  • Do nothing. The first first-aid document ships answers with no "call 193/192". Not chosen.

11. Open questions

  1. Confirm 193 as the number CBMSC wants the public to use for beach emergencies (vs 190/192 routing); fetch and cite in the string table before merging. Proposal: 193 + 192 as drafted.
  2. Should the footer also fire on Fallback.General answers to a safety question when no passage was retained (so safety would be false by the evidence rule)? Proposal: no in v1. The rule stays evidence-based; revisit if the benchmark shows safety questions falling to general mode often.
  3. Placement on the CLI: footer before or after the [n] citation list? Proposal: before, so the last thing on screen is the source links, as today.
  4. Should Answer.safety also gate the MCP tool's response metadata (a structured safety: true field) so an agent client can render it distinctly? Proposal: yes, additive, in the same PR.

Appendix

A. Footer strings (draft, to be sourced per §11.1). pt-BR: ⚠️ Em emergência na água: acione os guarda-vidas ou ligue 193 (Bombeiros) / 192 (SAMU). Esta resposta não substitui socorro profissional. en: ⚠️ In a water emergency in Brazil: alert the lifeguards or call 193 (fire/rescue) / 192 (SAMU ambulance). This answer is not a substitute for professional help.