# Two things we could not read

> When extraction is unsure, Curate asks instead of guessing, and shows the crop it is unsure about. Why asking beats being confidently wrong.

- Canonical: https://www.getcurate.ai/blog/recipes/two-things-we-could-not-read/
- Language: en
- Published: 2026-09-09
- Author: Curate
- Tags: recipes, extraction, design

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A curled page cuts off a quantity. A method says 220°C and a margin note says 450°F, which are not the same oven. A scan catches half a line.

There are two ways to handle that, and only one of them is honest.

## Guessing is cheap until it is not

The tempting option is to pick the likelier reading and move on. It keeps the flow clean, it produces a complete-looking recipe, and it is right most of the time.

The problem is what happens the rest of the time. A wrong quantity in a recipe is not discovered when it is made – it is discovered halfway through cooking, with the oven already hot. The cost of being confidently wrong is not distributed evenly across the times you are wrong. It is concentrated in the worst possible moment.

## So we ask

When Curate cannot read something, the item arrives saying so: *two things to check*, on the row, in your library. Opening it shows exactly what it could not read, and – this is the part that matters – **the crop of the photograph containing that line**.

You are not being asked to remember what the page said. You are being shown the page.

For the cut-off quantity: the crop, and the readings that fit. For the oven temperature: both numbers, where each came from, and the observation that they disagree. Because they do, and a tool that silently picked one would be hiding a fact about the source rather than about its own reading.

## Asking has to be bounded

A tool that asks about everything is worse than one that guesses, so the rule is narrow: **ask only where the answer changes the outcome and the reading is genuinely ambiguous.** A slightly odd ingredient name is not worth a question. A quantity that could be 500 or 600 is.

The rest of the recipe is just there, extracted, correct, needing nothing. The questions sit at the top and there are two of them, not fourteen.

## And you can ignore it

*Leave it as it is* is always an option, and the recipe stays exactly as extracted. Some things you already know. If you photographed that page, you probably remember whether it was 500 or 600, and being made to confirm it would be its own kind of rude.

The review is a shortcut for the moment you do not remember, which is most of them, later.