10. Steering the generator — type-level examples:

The schema tells the text-to-Cypher generator what exists; it does not tell it what to prefer. When two legal paths answer the same question — a projected scalar vs. a resolvable edge, a content property vs. a label — the generator can pick the plausible-but-wrong one and return an empty or ungrounded result without any error. That preference knowledge must live somewhere explicit, or it exists only as an accident of schema shape and dies on the next schema change.

The home for it is the examples: key on the owning type — a few-shot q/cypher pair rendered into the generator prompt:

- name: RelevantEmailThread
  virtualJoins: [ … ]
  examples:
    # STEERING — a "summarize my discussions with X" digest is built from thread CONTENT
    # (`t.snippet`), NEVER from topic labels and NEVER from a string literal:
    - q: "summarize my email discussions with Alex Doe"
      cypher: |
        MATCH (p:Person) WHERE toLower(p.name) CONTAINS 'alex' AND toLower(p.name) CONTAINS 'doe'
        MATCH (p)-[:RELEVANT_TO]->(t:RelevantEmailThread)
        RETURN summarize(t.snippet) AS digest

Mechanics:

• Attribution. Each example is attributed to its type’s schema segment (the realm’s group, or a host group like email-topics) and renders only when that segment does — under schema-relevance filtering an example loads exactly when the question needs its domain. Steering grows with the number of domains; per-question prompt cost stays flat.
• Connection gating. Examples gate with the type’s joins: a disconnected integration contributes neither schema nor steering.
• Placement rule. An example lives on the type that OWNS the path it teaches. A bridge across realms (thread → topic) is taught by the type that owns the target of the lesson.

Discipline (how these earn their place):

1. Steers follow pinned defects, never hunches. First a mirror test that reproduces the wrong shape and asserts the exact defect (wrong shape absent AND right data present — “no error, non-empty” admits garbage). Then the example. Then the gate.
2. Small. One q/cypher pair per defect class, placeholder names only (never real people, orgs, or repos).
3. Gated. An example change is a generation change: it ships only past the full hermetic mirror and a live queries.txt check.

Proven cases (2026-07): summarize(t.snippet) (content, not topic.name labels — fixed a live regression), t.participantNames (read the projected participant list, don’t fan back over the similarity edge), p.authorNames (the projected scalar; an AUTHORED_BY edge-walk in the same query as the fetch is empty). Each was a 5-line example that fixed a defect three rounds of schema-level engineering could not touch.

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