This is a submission for the Gemma 4 Challenge: Build with Gemma 4
What I Built
explaind is a local-first cognitive steering layer for Gemma 4. It is not a chatbot wrapper, not an agent system, and not a RAG tool. It is a structured prompt-assembly harness that shapes how Gemma 4 reasons — not just what it says.
The core thesis: for instruction-tuned models like Gemma 4, prompt structure is part of the system design. The harness, the template, and the injection positions are not presentation — they are the engineering. explaind makes that engineering explicit, inspectable, and testable.
The system is built around Gemma 4's documented failure modes rather than pretending they do not exist. Weak system prompt adherence, overconfidence, preference for parametric knowledge over injected context, and stochastic output variance are not problems to work around — they are the design brief.
