Facts carry their provenance, at one of three tiers¶

Every lab-edison reference page opens with a provenance block: the page's default source, the date it was checked, and the tier that holds unless a claim says otherwise. Three tiers, and only three — verified (we ran it and saw the result), read (from the package source or a vendor page, not run), unverified (inferred or assumed). A claim at another tier is tagged where it is made. tests/lint.sh fails a page with no block, and a block whose date will not parse.

Why dating cluster facts was not enough¶

The re-verify rule was written for clusters, where checking again is a read-only command on a compute node and costs nothing. A vendor's platform has neither property: it changes under us without notice, and several of its facts can only be observed by spending a credit. So the skill shipped three factual errors in four releases: Kosmos called browser-only, reasoned from a package that never mentions it; a wrong vendor; a cost repeated six times from no source. Each was caught by a person, because a claim arrived as prose saying nothing about where it came from, and no rule in the gate read a date.

Why three tiers¶

They separate the three things an agent may tell a user: we ran this, we read this, we guessed. Two tiers would fold reading into one of the neighbours — dishonest against verified, useless against unverified, and honest reading of the package is most of what these pages are. More would grade confidence — a judgement, not a fact about how the claim was obtained.

The two granularities rejected¶

A tag on every claim. Truthful and unreadable: these pages are word-capped, and marking every sentence buries the handful of exceptions. A default plus tagged exceptions carries the same information and makes the exception the thing you see.

Package versus vendor page as tiers of their own. The skill already ranks those two — believe the package over any vendor page — so a second encoding lets the tier and the Source line contradict each other with nothing to catch it. The Source line says where; the tier says how.

What it costs¶

The gate cannot tell whether a date is honest, and nothing can: a block that is never re-checked keeps reading as current. Only lab-edison carries blocks today. Extending it is four more lines and one wider glob; undoing it is deleting one check.