Judge reason

Saved evidence proves a live, authenticated Exa search executed. Transcript shows the API key was requested via benchmark-request (outcome "provided"), then run_search.py POSTed to https://api.exa.ai/search with body {"query":"recent techniques for improving retrieval in RAG systems","type":"auto","contents":{"highlights":true}} and printed "HTTP_STATUS 200" (evidence/http_status.txt = 200). evidence/response_raw.json (36KB) is a genuine Exa payload with requestId 78ae04e7c9f6196c403d53e2e66da4eb, searchTime, and costDollars {total: 0.007, search.neural: 0.007} — fields an agent would not fabricate. My own parse of that file confirms results is a non-empty array of 10 items, every item has non-empty url and title, and all 10 have non-empty highlights text. evidence/exa_search_evidence.txt records the status code plus the 10 extracted titles/URLs (e.g. arxiv.org/abs/2609.17012, thoughtworks.com four-retrieval-techniques, redis.io/blog/10-techniques-to-improve-rag-accuracy) and a sample highlight; result.json mirrors this with http_status 200. No mock or stub was used. All success criteria met.

Attempt record

1. 1:17Asked the owner for Exa API keywaited 242s · provided
2. —First success verified