PR #285's entity grounding checked only title + snippet. That missed:
- YouTube videos where the entity is mentioned in transcript but not
in title (false demotion of on-topic content)
- Reddit posts where the entity is in top comments but not in title
(false demotion of on-topic discussion)
And it also wasn't strong enough to reliably demote items like the
2026-04-19 Nate Herk "Managed Agents" video - which had no Hermes
anywhere - because the -25 penalty on rerank_score composed to only
-15 on final_score via the 0.60 weight, and engagement bonus partially
offset that.
Two fixes:
1. _candidate_haystack() now joins title + snippet +
metadata[transcript_snippet] + metadata[transcript_highlights] +
metadata[top_comments][*].excerpt/text + metadata[comment_insights].
Catches entity mentions wherever they actually live. Guarded with
isinstance checks so malformed metadata doesn't raise.
2. ENTITY_MISS_FINAL_PENALTY (20.0) applied directly in _final_score
when candidate.explanation contains "entity-miss". This lands the
full penalty weight on the composite signal that cluster-scoring
consumes, instead of being diluted by the rerank_score weight.
Combined effect: entity-miss gap grows from ~15 to ~35 points.
Tests: 8 new scenarios covering transcript match, transcript highlight
match, top-comment match, comment-insight match, empty-text skip,
no-primary-entity no-op, and the dual-penalty composition check.
The 2026-04-19 Hermes Agent Use Cases run had a Nate Herk YouTube video
titled "I Tested Claude's New Managed Agents" score 51 and rank #2
with zero Hermes content. The reranker had intent-specific scoring hints
but no entity-grounding check, so topic-vicinity matches (one offhand
OpenClaw mention) drifted to the top.
Add _primary_entity(topic) that strips intent-modifier suffixes ("use
cases", "workflows", etc.) so "Hermes Agent use cases" yields
primary_entity="Hermes Agent". Pass the entity through to both the LLM
and fallback scoring paths.
Fallback path: if primary_entity is not found (case-insensitive) in
title + snippet, subtract ENTITY_MISS_PENALTY (25 pts). Skip the
demotion for candidates with no text at all (image-only TikToks etc.)
to avoid false negatives on thin-text sources.
LLM path: add a "Primary entity grounding" hint to _build_prompt when
primary_entity is non-empty. Instructs the LLM to score candidates
without the entity at <=30.
Tests: 24 rerank tests pass, including 8 new entity-grounding tests.
Matt Van Horn