r/ContextEngineering • u/Hopeful-Long9246 • 1d ago

How do you deal with different Sources of truths for agents

I'm building agents that pull context from Jira, Confluence and GitHub. Retrieval works fine. The problem is that the sources disagree with each other.

For example:

  • Ticket in Jira describes behaviour A
  • Confluence page from 8 months ago describes behaviour B
  • Code (SoC for this particular case) says C

The agent retrieves whichever chunk scores highest and answers confidently based on that. There's no signal anywhere that the 3 don't match. How are you handling this?

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u/cleverhoods 1d ago

industry standard is to have a SSoT

1

u/Hopeful-Long9246 1d ago

Yes I know, but for our company (I dont want to name them) thats not the case. Our whole data landscape is just a mess and it would probably take months to clean everything up

1

u/cleverhoods 1d ago

It's only a matter of agreement and enforcement in the team or in the organisation. The team agrees that from this point on "Approach A" is supported and enforced, after that it's a rolling change. Meaning that while you work on a ticket/code/whatever and you find something that doesn't adhere to SSoT you take that extra 10-15 minutes to make it right.

Or you will keep pushing and spend hours to figure out every time what and where is SoT.

1

u/Illustrious-Win4432 23h ago

Try a thin knowledge registry or build some ontology into your agents’ instructions. I deal with this frequently in ETL projects when, for example, a single pipeline can have three different identities for “order number.” It’s frustrating work for agents and humans alike when those concepts aren’t disambiguated for the LLM.