How Ask the Forge works
AI writes every answer. What happens next is the point: every quotation is checked word for word against the library before you see a word.
1. You ask
A question can be up to 500 characters, and you can ask 5 a day. Cloudflare checks that the request comes from a person, not a bot.
2. The Forge finds passages
Your question is searched against Alexandria, the corpus behind this site: Scripture, the Fathers, and Church documents. The search works by meaning as well as by matching words, and returns up to 30 passages. To search by meaning, the text of your question is sent to Voyage AI.
Only works of the Coptic Orthodox Church and the wider Oriental Orthodox tradition, held as authoritative, can be found. Works from outside it are left out, not shown with a label. Sermons can inform an answer but are never quoted.
3. AI drafts the answer
An LLM with strict guardrails writes the answer from those passages, quoting them where it can.
4. Every quotation is checked
Each passage the answer puts in double quotation marks, three words or longer, is compared word for word with the passages found for your question. Capitals, accents and punctuation are ignored; the words are not. This check is ordinary code with no AI in it. A quotation of seven words or more that matches none of the passages found may still be traced anywhere in the same library, under the same rules. The source shown under a quotation is the passage its words were found in.
A second model also reads the draft against the Church’s teaching. If it judges the draft unsound, or cannot reach a verdict, the answer is withheld.
5. When a quotation fails
The Forge tries small repairs that can be proved: moving a word at the edge of the quotation outside the marks, or restoring a single word to the source’s own wording. Failing that, it cuts the sentence, but only if most of the answer survives. Every repair is checked again. If nothing can be proved, the whole answer is withheld, and you are told so instead of being shown it.
6. What you see
The answer, and under it every quotation that passed, with the author, the work and the place in it. This usually takes 30 to 90 seconds. Your last ten answers are saved in your own browser so you can reopen them.
7. What is kept
The text of your question, without your name, email or IP address, is deleted after 90 days. Answers are not stored on our servers. The privacy policy names everyone who receives what you type.
What it cannot promise
The check proves that quoted words really appear in a work in the library, and the source shown is the one they were found in. It does not check that the answer’s own sentences credit them to the right Father or work, so trust the source shown under a quotation over the name in the text. It does not prove that a sentence in the answer’s own words is fair to the Father it summarises, and it does not check text that is not in double quotation marks. Read the cited passage for anything that matters. No answer is an official statement of the Coptic Orthodox Church, and none replaces your priest.