Where Domain Knowledge Actually Lives — Trade Press, Regulators, Practitioners, Post-Mortems

The blog post that was two years old

Tanvi had been at the agritech startup in Lucknow for three weeks when she needed to understand how agricultural produce marketing works in Uttar Pradesh.

The company was building a platform that let farmers sell directly to bulk buyers without going through the traditional mandi system. The product manager had asked her to build a compliance module that checked whether a particular transaction was legal under the state's current APMC rules — which crops were exempt from mandi fees, which were not, which transactions needed a mandi licence and which did not.

She did what any reasonable engineer in 2026 would do first. She asked an AI model. The model gave her a confident, well-structured, plausible summary of India's APMC framework. It explained the original APMC Act, the 2020 reforms, the three farm laws, and the state-level variations. It was fluent, coherent, and partly wrong.

The 2020 farm laws had been repealed in 2021. The model knew this but still described a regulatory landscape that mixed pre-repeal and post-repeal states of the law, presenting both as if they coexisted in a single current framework. It described exemptions that had existed in 2022 and had been modified since. It cited a UP state notification that, when Tanvi finally found it on the UP government's website, turned out to have been superseded by a newer notification eleven months later.

She then searched for blog posts. She found seven. Three were broadly correct but vague. Two were written in 2023 and described a regulatory state that no longer existed. One was a vendor's marketing content disguised as an explainer. One was genuinely good but covered Maharashtra, not UP, and the rules are different in every state.