Entroly Limitations
Entroly is a local context control plane. It can reduce what you send, preserve
more useful context under a budget, and surface verification signals. It does
not make provider calls free, guarantee perfect answers, or override provider
terms.
What Entroly Does Not Guarantee
- No universal savings guarantee. Savings depend on repo size, prompt shape,
model context window, tool-output volume, and how often provider prefix caches
hit.
- No zero quality-loss guarantee. Benchmarks measure retention on specific
datasets and budgets; some workloads lose accuracy when the budget is too
tight.
- No provider certification. Entroly works through documented local proxy,
SDK, MCP, and wrapper paths, but each provider account remains subject to
that provider’s terms, data policy, model limits, and rate limits.
- No fully local cloud inference. Entroly indexes and selects locally, but when
you use a cloud LLM API, the optimized prompt still goes to that provider.
- No automatic legal/compliance decision.
docs/provider-compliance.md is an
engineering checklist, not legal advice.
- No perfect hallucination detection. WITNESS/STAVE/EICV are local verifiers
with measured false positives and false negatives. Use strict mode only when
conservative suppression is acceptable.
- No exact provider image token guarantee for every model. Entroly estimates
image tokens from published provider formulas where available; provider usage
metadata or token-count APIs remain the source of truth.
Best-Fit Workloads
- Large or medium repos where raw context does not fit.
- Chatty coding agents where repeated prefixes and old tool outputs dominate
cost.
- Teams that want local preflight measurement before changing provider traffic.
- Workflows where evidence-grounded verification is useful even when it is not
perfect.
Poor-Fit Workloads
- Tiny prompts that already fit comfortably.
- One-off creative tasks where all context is intentionally unstructured.
- Tasks where any compression, selection, or image downscaling is unacceptable.
- Provider/tool configurations whose terms do not permit local proxies or
custom endpoints.
How To Measure Honestly
Use local commands first:
entroly simulate --budget 4096
entroly perf --budget 4096 --json
entroly verify-claims
These commands do not call an LLM. They estimate local context reduction and
optimizer latency. They are not a bill guarantee because they exclude output
tokens, provider cache hit rates, retries, tool-use overhead, and model-specific
pricing changes.
For live traffic, inspect response headers such as:
X-Entroly-Action
X-Entroly-Outcome
X-Entroly-Transform-Compliant
X-Entroly-Tokens-Saved-Pct
X-Entroly-Cache-Hit-Rate
Provider invoices and provider usage metadata remain the billing source of
truth.
Image optimization is opt-in. The default behavior is to preserve image bytes
and only report estimates/recommendations. When enabled, Entroly gates any image
rewrite on estimated token savings and a quality floor.
References for current formulas and token-count behavior:
- OpenAI image token accounting: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/images-vision
- Anthropic vision image sizing and rough token estimate: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/vision
- Gemini multimodal token counting: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/tokens
Context Receipts
Context Receipts are an audit trail for local context selection. They improve
inspectability, but they do not prove that the selected context is complete or
that an answer is legally, financially, medically, or operationally correct.
Each receipt includes a deterministic risk_summary so these boundaries are
visible in the artifact instead of hidden in marketing copy.
- Dependency detection is heuristic. The MVP catches obvious defined terms and
references such as
as defined in, subject to, pursuant to, see
section, exhibits, schedules, addenda, and clauses. It can miss implicit
dependencies, unusual drafting styles, scanned/OCR errors, tables, footnotes,
and jurisdiction-specific language.
- BM25-style retrieval is lexical. The semantic/vector scorer and reranker are
extension points, but the local default does not claim embedding-level recall.
- Page numbers are preserved only when the input text exposes page markers. PDF
layout reconstruction and OCR are outside this MVP path.
- Fingerprints make a receipt reproducible for the ingested text bytes. They do
not certify that the source corpus was complete, authorized, or unchanged
outside the files Entroly saw.
- Omitted-context warnings are conservative signals, not exhaustive proof of all
missing evidence.
risk_summary.coverage_score and review_level are local heuristics derived
from chunk coverage, token coverage, unresolved dependencies, and omitted
relevant chunks. They are triage signals, not correctness probabilities.
- Human review is required for contracts, compliance, policy, and audit use
cases. Use receipts to inspect evidence and risk, not as a substitute for
professional review.
Compliance Checklist
Before production use:
- Confirm your provider and tool terms permit the chosen proxy, wrapper, or SDK
path.
- Run
entroly doctor --privacy.
- Run provider-shape tests for the APIs you use.
- Start in audit/observe mode, inspect headers, then enable stronger mutation
paths deliberately.
- Keep benchmark claims tied to committed artifacts and dated reproduction
commands.