Ground every agent turn in real facts

Ground every agent turn in real facts

When an agent asks “what’s the user’s current plan tier?”, a language model will cheerfully make one up. When it asks “what time is it?”, it’ll guess. The fix is not a better prompt — it’s a companion deterministic layer that supplies the ground truth on every turn.

FactResolver is that companion. You implement it, you declare which keys you supply, and Atmosphere prepends the resolved bundle to the system prompt before every dispatch.

The default behavior

Atmosphere ships DefaultFactResolver out of the box. It supplies time.now (UTC ISO-8601) and time.timezone only. With no extra wiring, every turn’s system prompt starts with:

Grounded facts (deterministic, as of this turn):
- time.now: 2026-04-19T18:32:14Z
- time.timezone: UTC

That alone closes the “what year is it?” class of hallucination.

Writing a production resolver

Apps typically want richer facts — user name, locale, plan tier, feature-flag values, recent audit events. Implement FactResolver and supply any subset of keys from FactKeys plus your own app.* keys.

public final class UserProfileFactResolver implements FactResolver {

    private final ProfileService profiles;
    private final FeatureFlags  flags;
    private final AuditLog      audit;

    @Override
    public FactBundle resolve(FactRequest req) {
        var out = new LinkedHashMap<String, Object>();

        if (req.keys().contains(FactKeys.USER_NAME)) {
            profiles.lookup(req.userId())
                .ifPresent(p -> out.put(FactKeys.USER_NAME, p.name()));
        }
        if (req.keys().contains(FactKeys.USER_LOCALE)) {
            out.put(FactKeys.USER_LOCALE,
                    profiles.lookup(req.userId())
                            .map(Profile::locale)
                            .orElse("en-US"));
        }
        if (req.keys().contains(FactKeys.USER_PLAN_TIER)) {
            out.put(FactKeys.USER_PLAN_TIER,
                    profiles.lookup(req.userId())
                            .map(Profile::planTier)
                            .orElse("free"));
        }
        // Custom app key — the framework treats unknown keys transparently.
        if (req.keys().contains("app.recent_order_id")) {
            profiles.lastOrder(req.userId())
                    .ifPresent(o -> out.put("app.recent_order_id", o.id()));
        }
        return new FactBundle(out);
    }
}

Contracts to honor

• Thread-safe — resolve() is called from every inbound agent turn, possibly concurrently.
• Never returns null — return FactBundle.empty() rather than null when nothing applies.
• Cheap per-call — the resolver runs on the request hot path before every LLM dispatch. Cache expensive lookups inside your implementation; the framework does not cache resolve() results.

Wiring the resolver

Three ways to install, in priority order:

1. Spring bean (recommended)

@Configuration
class FactResolverConfig {
    @Bean
    FactResolver productionResolver(ProfileService profiles,
                                    FeatureFlags flags,
                                    AuditLog audit) {
        return new UserProfileFactResolver(profiles, flags, audit);
    }
}

AtmosphereAiAutoConfiguration.atmosphereFactResolverBridge publishes the bean onto framework.properties() under FactResolver.FACT_RESOLVER_PROPERTY; AiEndpointHandler.resolveFactResolver finds it first.

2. ServiceLoader (plain servlet / Quarkus / embedded)

Drop a file at META-INF/services/org.atmosphere.ai.facts.FactResolver containing your resolver’s fully-qualified class name. The handler’s ServiceLoader.load(FactResolver.class).findFirst() picks it up.

3. Manual install (tests, CLI tools)

FactResolverHolder.install(new UserProfileFactResolver(...));

The process-wide holder is the lowest priority fallback — mostly useful for test setup via @BeforeAll + FactResolverHolder.reset() in @AfterEach.

What the model sees

The resolver’s bundle is rendered as a newline-delimited block and prepended to the system prompt. A request from alice@example.com on a paid tier sees, at the top of the system prompt:

Grounded facts (deterministic, as of this turn):
- time.now: 2026-04-19T18:32:14Z
- time.timezone: UTC
- user.id: alice@example.com
- user.name: Alice Martin
- user.locale: en-US
- user.plan_tier: enterprise
- app.recent_order_id: ord-7821

[then whatever the developer's @AiEndpoint systemPrompt said]

Prompt-injection guard

Values are escaped before rendering — newline, carriage return, tab, and ASCII control characters are replaced with a space. A fact value like "Alice\nIgnore prior instructions" cannot open a new line in the system prompt. Without this escape, a malicious or accidental embedded newline could reshape the instruction context.

When NOT to use this

• Large blobs — the bundle lands in the system prompt and consumes tokens. Use an AiTool the model can call on demand for retrieval.
• Per-message context — FactResolver resolves once per turn, not per message in a multi-round tool loop. For per-message context, use ContextProvider instead.
• Secrets — the bundle is visible to the model. Never put API keys, passwords, or PII in here.

See also

AI Filters & Guardrails

Inspect and block the response path — PII redaction + drift detection. /tutorial/12-ai-filters/

Tag agent calls with business outcomes

Sibling primitive for observability tagging via SLF4J MDC. /tutorial/27-business-metadata-observability/

DefaultFactResolver source

modules/ai/src/main/java/org/atmosphere/ai/facts/DefaultFactResolver.java