Two funnels side by side — the left one wide-mouthed catching many candidate issues, the right one narrow filtering only the valuable findings

Cascade Retrieval: A 15-Year-Old IR Trick Fixed My Design Review Agent

Series: Classic Theory Meets Agent Practice (Part 1) TL;DR: A design review agent needs to find every issue AND avoid false positives. One agent can’t do both. Borrowing cascade retrieval from information retrieval — a 15-year-old method — I split it into two: a Recall Pass that casts a wide net, and a Precision Pass that filters strictly. Real defects get caught earlier, and the risk of rework during development drops. ...

2026-05-22 · 9 min · Alex Wang