pediatric-ai-scribe-v3/docs/my-resources.md

# My Resources

Teaching material a signed-in user generates for themselves — a deck for
tomorrow's session, a handout, a summary — kept privately and exported as
PowerPoint, Word or PDF.

Deliberately separate from the Learning Hub. That is moderator-owned content
published into categories for everyone; this needs no role beyond being signed
in, and nothing here is shared. Every statement filters on `user_id`, and there
is no route that returns another person's work. Sharing, if it is ever wanted,
should be a deliberate feature rather than something that leaks out of a
forgotten `WHERE` clause.

## What a resource is

| Column | |
|---|---|
| `markdown` | the readable artifact — what Word renders and what a text edit edits |
| `deck` | for a presentation, the slide structure the model designed (see below) |
| `image_ids` | the illustration jobs belonging to this resource, in the order they were made |
| `topic`, `grounded_count` | what it was asked for and how many library excerpts it was written from |

`MAX_PER_USER` caps how many a person may keep.

## Sources

One function, `gatherSources()`, answers "what is this written from" for both
generating and modifying, so the two cannot drift into offering different things
or searching them differently.

- **The clinical library** — on by default. Semantic retrieval over the indexed
  corpus. Budgets are in [retrieval-tuning.md](retrieval-tuning.md).
- **PubMed** — admin-enabled, optional API key. Returns structured records so a
  reference carries a PMID somebody can look up.
- **The web** — admin-enabled, provider-configurable (Tavily, Serper, Brave,
  SearXNG).
- **Illustrations** — see below.

Each option hides itself when an administrator has not enabled it, so nothing
appears that a person could tick and then be refused.

Nothing here may fail a generation. A retrieval or search that comes back empty
is reported as a reason and the resource is written from what is available.

### Searching is the route's job, not the model's

Both searches run up front on the topic, and their results go into the prompt as
findings. They are **not** offered as tools.

They were, once. Tested live against a question explicitly about recent trials,
the model never called them — with or without corpus grounding, and no matter
how the tool description was worded, because the prompt ends "Output ONLY Pandoc
markdown" and a model told to output only markdown does not emit a tool call.
Calling `callAI` with the tool directly produced a correct call, so the plumbing
was never the problem. The search only ever needed the topic, and the route
knows the topic before it calls the model.

### Keyword searches get the topic, retrieval gets more

PubMed ANDs every mapped term, so one unrecognised word takes a query to zero:
`"febrile seizures"` returns six results and `"febrile seizures in under-fives"`
returns none. A query that finds nothing is retried against progressively
shorter versions of itself, longest first, and the response says which query
actually worked. Those retries are spaced — three `esearch` calls back to back
trips NCBI's three-a-second limit without an API key.

When modifying, the library search gets the topic *plus* the instruction —
retrieval is semantic and benefits from context — while PubMed and the web get
the topic alone.

### Empty searches must not invite invention

When a search was asked for and came back empty, the prompt says not to invent a
citation, a PMID or a URL to fill the gap. Without that the model supplies them
from memory, and a fabricated PMID is indistinguishable from a real one.

## Presentations are designed, not written

A presentation is described as a **deck**: the model returns JSON naming a
layout per slide and the prompt for each figure it wants. Articles stay
markdown, which is what prose wants.

Markdown could express about five of the things the renderer can draw, so the
model had no way to say "put this figure beside these three bullets" or "make
this a comparison with two labelled columns" — the parser inferred a layout from
the shape of a list, and inferring is what made every deck look the same.

Layouts: `title`, `section`, `bullets`, `two`, `compare`, `table`, `callout`,
`figure`, `image`. See `src/utils/deckSchema.js` for what each accepts.

Markdown is still produced, serialised from the deck, so Word export and text
editing keep working and the stored artifact stays readable by a person. The
deck is stored alongside it because that serialisation is lossy by design:
round-tripping through markdown would discard the layout choices.

Nothing costs more than the thing that went wrong — a reply that is not a deck
falls back to asking for markdown; a malformed slide degrades to bullets; a
comparison with one column is not a comparison; JSON wrapped in fences or a
covering sentence is read rather than refused.

## Illustrations

`resourceImages.js`, **not** the shared `imageTool.dispatch` — that one permits
exactly one image per request, which is right for a chat reply and wrong for a
twelve-slide deck, and the clinical assistant and Learning Hub depend on that
rule. Same queue, same storage, same `my_resources` workflow, same asset
endpoint; only the number differs, bounded at `MAX_IMAGES` because each figure
is a paid request.

"Use 3 diagrams" in the instructions is read as the number it is. Writing
"include a diagram of the airway" switches the illustration option on and says
why, rather than the request being dropped in silence; switching it off by hand
sticks.

`my_resources` is its own image workflow rather than a reuse of `learning_hub`
because `generated_image_links` only accepts `learning_hub` assets — that is the
barrier keeping a private illustration out of published content.

### Getting a model to illustrate at all

Two things had to be right, both measured:

1. The illustration guidance is the **last** thing in the prompt. Placed before
   the output rules it lost: the model returned 3297 characters of markdown and
   zero tool calls, while the same tool and wording in a shorter prompt produced
   three calls.
2. Even last, it loses to a prompt carrying thirty library excerpts —
   deterministically: library off → three calls, library on → none. So when the
   author names a number the call is **required** rather than offered. With no
   number named the choice stays the model's.

A model that has just made three tool calls also tends to sign off instead of
writing — `"I'll create the presentation and the three teaching diagrams."` was
once returned as the resource, 61 characters, because only a completely empty
body counted as missing. A body with no title block and no heading is now
treated as missing whatever its length.

## Export

| Format | Built by |
|---|---|
| `pptx` | `scripts/render_pptx.py` (python-pptx) from the stored deck |
| `docx` | pandoc, from the markdown |
| `pdf` | Gotenberg (LibreOffice), from whichever office file above |

Pandoc's pptx writer was the ceiling on how good a deck could be, and the model
on top made no difference to it: a handful of reference layouts, no per-slide
layout, no positioning, no control over how large an image is drawn. It also
leaves a bare `<a:bodyPr/>` on every shape, so slides overflowed until autofit
was injected into its emitted OOXML by hand.

The renderer sizes text to fit before writing the file rather than trusting
autofit — LibreOffice ignores `<a:normAutofit/>` when converting to PDF, which
is how slides were being cut off mid-sentence. Wrapped bullet lines hang under
the text. Images are drawn at their own aspect ratio.

If the renderer fails for any reason, pandoc still produces a deck: a plainer
deck beats a failed download. The log line is
`deck renderer failed, falling back to pandoc`.

Figures are fetched to a scratch directory for the renderer and removed
afterwards. One that cannot be fetched is left out rather than failing a
download that works without it.

**Runtime dependency:** the image carries `python3`, `py3-lxml`, `py3-pillow`
(apk — both are C extensions with no Alpine wheels) and `python-pptx` pinned at
1.0.2 from pip. Roughly 58MB. Unpinned, a rebuild from the same commit could
produce different decks.

## Modify

`POST /api/my-resources/:id/refine` rewrites a resource in place, keeping its
id, its downloads and its References section. It offers the same four sources as
generating — it had none, so "add what the 2024 trial showed" was answered from
the model's memory rather than by looking anything up.

The previous version is replaced, not versioned.