recap-relay/docs/issues-backlog.md

Recap Relay — Issues Backlog

Things to come back to. Each entry: what was observed, why it's queued, possible causes.

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Empty analysis section on chunked-analyze output

Observed: 2026-05-19, during the v0.2.77 Phase 1A smoke test.

• 94-min YouTube video processed end-to-end on hardware path
• 6 analyze windows completed cleanly per the relay logs
• 15 sections rendered in the Recaps UI; ONE section (timestamp 1:07:40 → 1:10:25) had no title and no description
• All other sections normal

Why not a Phase 1A regression:

• Empty section sits at an analyze-window boundary (~1 hour in), NOT at an audio-chunk overlap boundary (those are at multiples of 270 seconds)
• Phase 1A only changed how audio is split for transcription, didn't touch the analyze step

Possible causes:

1. The hardware LLM (RedHatAI/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B at the time) returned a section in its JSON with empty title and summary strings. The chunked-analyze stitcher currently accepts that as a valid section. Some LLMs hallucinate empty sections at boundaries where they're uncertain.
2. The stitcher's window-merge logic created a degenerate section spanning the gap between two windows' claimed coverage. The window-overlap math may have a hole.

Triage path when picked up:

• In the relay's Jobs detail view, find the v0.2.77 smoke-test job for the 94-min Sovreign podcast
• Inspect the raw JSON each of the 6 analyze windows returned
• If window 4 or 5's JSON contains {"title": "", "summary": "", "startIndex": …, "endIndex": …}, it's cause #1 — fix by filtering empty sections in the stitcher
• If the windows' JSON looks clean but the stitched output has a gap, it's cause #2 — fix the window-merge boundary math

Priority: Low. 1-in-15 sections affected, content still readable, doesn't block release. Worth fixing before broader hardware-path rollout but not blocking diarization work.

Status: queued. Picking up after Phase 1D ships (diarization complete).