Why we publish the cases where our tool performs worst

Standard practice for a product blog is to publish the cases where the product worked. We publish the ones where it did not, and I want to argue that this is not humility or transparency theatre — it is the only thing that makes the output usable. The specific limitation The tool reads text for structure: which sentences are verifiable claims, which are opinions in factual clothing, which claims lack attribution, what is missing. Its most significant limitation is input sensitivity. The assessment depends heavily on how much text you provide. Submit three paragraphs and you get an assessment of three paragraphs. Submit the full article and the reading can change substantially — because context that appeared absent was present later, or because a ratio that looked alarming was an artefact of where the excerpt was cut. This is not a defect awaiting a fix. Structure is a property of a whole document. A fragment is a different document. Any method that reads structure has this property, and the ones that do not advertise it have it anyway. Why hiding it would be worse than the limitation A tool that always produces a confident number teaches its users that confident assessment is available. That lesson is false, and it is more damaging than any individual wrong assessment. Consider what a user does with a score they cannot calibrate. They either accept it, in which case they have outsourced a judgement to a system whose failure modes they cannot see, or they reject it the first time it disagrees with them, in which case the tool was never doing anything. Neither user is reading better. Both have replaced their own judgement with a relationship to a black box — acceptance in one case, dismissal in the other. A user who knows that excerpt length changes the reading does something different: they check the input before trusting the output. That is a transferable skill. It applies to every other analytical tool they will ever use. The credibility argument There is also a st