api-list-negative-graceful-on-malformed-llm

IN premise

When the LLM returns unparseable output, `list_negative()` returns `count == 0` rather than raising an exception — graceful degradation over failure.

Summary

If the language model produces a response that can't be parsed, the system treats it as "no results found" instead of crashing. This means a bad LLM response never breaks the user's workflow — they just see an empty list, which is safe and recoverable.

Dependents

These beliefs depend on this one:

list-negative-is-defensively-bounded — The negative belief listing pipeline applies defense-in-depth: keyword pre-filtering narrows candidates before LLM classification, hallucinated node IDs are discarded against the actual network, and malformed LLM output falls back gracefully to zero count rather than raising.
list-negative-parser-is-fully-resilient — The list-negative LLM response parser handles all degradation levels: regex extraction recovers JSON objects from prose-laden responses, and completely unparseable output returns zero results gracefully rather than raising exceptions.

Details

Source

entries/2026/04/29/tests-test_api.md