--- title: "From your question to a finished answer · AssistantGeneral" description: "Each stage a request passes through, in order." url: "https://royalsoftworks.com/products/assistant-general/how-it-works/step-by-step/" source: "https://royalsoftworks.com" format: "markdown" note: "Markdown rendering of the HTML page at `url`. Same content, same canonical URL." --- How it works · 2 of 3 # From your question to a finished answer. Each stage a request passes through, in order. Under the hood ## From your question to a finished answer. A technical walk-through of what actually happens between you asking and the agent replying. 1. 01 ### Route The request is classified and routed to the right model — local by default, or a cloud provider if that task is configured to use one. A simple question gets a direct answer, and one your documents answer is answered from them in a single step. 2. 02 ### Plan A planning pass decomposes the request into concrete steps before any tool runs, the same way a careful person sketches an approach first. 3. 03 ### Split (when it helps) Independent parts of a big request can be handed to helpers. Each starts with a clean slate, checks its own claims, and returns a short report — so pages of raw material never crowd the main conversation. 4. 04 ### Retrieve Hybrid retrieval pulls grounding context from the knowledge bases this chat is allowed to read: vector similarity and keyword search are fused with Reciprocal Rank Fusion, then reranked and deduplicated. 5. 05 ### Act Tools execute under policy: file operations, document generation, connector queries, workflow steps — each gated by the three-tier permission model. 6. 06 ### Verify A groundedness check tests the draft's specific claims against what was retrieved. Several unsupported claims trigger a targeted re-search and a revision; a stray one is flagged so the answer hedges it. On a computer the speed check rates slow, this step is skipped unless you turn it back on. 7. 07 ### Check citations (optional) For legal work, the cases an answer cites can be looked up in a public legal database. One reported as not existing sends the answer back; a source that is offline or silent never condemns a citation. 8. 08 ### Review A file it produced is re-opened and audited for errors, placeholders and broken references, and repaired before you get it. A second read-through of written answers can be switched on in Settings. 9. 09 ### Finish You get the answer or the finished file — plus a full trace of every step, tool call and source it used to get there. [Previous It doesn't guess. It works.](https://royalsoftworks.com/products/assistant-general/how-it-works/the-loop/) [Next Everything happens inside the box.](https://royalsoftworks.com/products/assistant-general/how-it-works/inside-the-box/) [All of AssistantGeneral how it works](https://royalsoftworks.com/products/assistant-general/how-it-works/)