Without the manual sentence, the cell stays open
A vendor questionnaire is not answered by letting a model pick a colour. Without the sentence in the manual, the cell stays open.
This week I watched an agent work through a vendor questionnaire. The row was small. It asked whether a device supports a feature at a given resolution. The agent wanted to paint a colour. Red or green. The real work sat in front of that: find the sentence that is allowed to carry the colour.
Silence is not a no
A lot of drafts turn an empty search into a no. The manual does not mention the feature, so the cell goes red. That is convenient. It is wrong. A manual that does not mention something has not disproved the feature. It has left it open.
A no needs a sentence that rules the feature out for that exact device. If the sentence is missing, the cell stays open. Open is not a dodge. Open is what the documents actually say.
What the agent is allowed to write
The sequence is short. Split the row: which product family, which device, which limit. Then the agent searches the manuals, the datasheet, the hardware catalog, and the vendor’s official site. Only the sentence it finds may carry the verdict.
Four outcomes are enough. Fully met, partly met, not met, or open. Cursor in agent mode holds the loop. Python does the search. The source stays on the cell, so you read the sentence and not only the colour.
Letting the model answer from memory is the expensive shortcut. It sounds finished. You cannot check it.
How you recognise the cell
Green only with a sentence. Red only with an explicit denial for that device. Everything else stays open, even when the model has an opinion. The opinion does not go into the bid. The sentence does.
What this does not replace
The loop does not replace the person who owns the bid. It replaces the hour you spend paging through a dozen PDFs for one sentence, still unsure whether you missed it.
The same discipline applies when an agent is wired to your own tools: a person still approves, and a claim without a source does not count. More on that is under vertical integration.
If a questionnaire like that is on your desk, write to me via contact. The documents have to be there. Without them, the cell stays open for me too.