Design Questions for Reliable Conversational AI Applications
Maxwell AI Counsellor is a private commercial conversational AI project. Until its implementation is reviewed for publication, the following is an engineering discussion, not a verified account of its internal architecture.
Questions that shape the architecture
How is conversational context represented and bounded? How are sensitive interactions handled? What evaluation set reveals unhelpful or unsafe responses? How can model updates be tested before release? Which operations require human escalation rather than automated answers?
Engineering principles
- Separate user-facing interaction, model invocation, and application policy.
- Design privacy and retention controls around the actual sensitivity of the data.
- Evaluate usefulness and failure modes, not only response fluency.
- Record versioned prompts and model configurations where appropriate.
- Avoid describing RAG, agents, or other components as deployed without implementation evidence.
This article will be expanded with verified architectural decisions when disclosure is approved.