Citations, confidence, and conflicting sources

An answer that sounds finished is not the same as an answer you can check. Cairn is built around that difference. It is a private, on-device knowledge assistant. It indexes your files and the tools you connect, including Slack and Notion, and it puts a citation on every sentence. It also shows how old the source is, shows a confidence indication, and flags sources that disagree.

Those are four different facts. They are easy to collapse into “it has sources.” This note keeps them apart, because you use them for different decisions.

The citation is the check

Citation grounding means the sentence points at a source the assistant actually retrieved, not at a general claim about the world. Cairn’s rule is a citation on every sentence. If you cannot open the source, you do not have a grounded sentence yet, whatever the prose sounds like.

The practical habit is in Search your notes with citations: ask a question you could also answer by opening the file, then open the file. The first few times you do this, you are testing the product. Later you are using it.

We do not publish an accuracy percentage. A citation you can open is the test that fits a single Mac.

Age and confidence are not the same dial

Source age tells you whether the cited document is old relative to the question. A procedure written two years ago can still be right. It can also describe a tool you replaced. Age does not pick a winner. It stops you from treating every citation as current.

Confidence is the app’s indication of how firmly that sentence is supported. We do not publish the numeric scale on this site, and you should not invent one while reading the answer. Use it as a reason to slow down on the weak sentence, then read the citation. A high-confidence sentence with an old source is a different situation from a low-confidence sentence with a source you edited this morning.

Conflicts are the useful failure

Conflicting sources are what you hope the assistant will not hide. A Slack thread and a Notion page can disagree. Two docs in the same folder can disagree. Cairn flags the conflict instead of silently choosing a voice. The use case Ask Slack and Notion, and read the source age is where this shows up most often, because connected tools accumulate parallel versions of the truth.

When you see a flag, the next step is human. Decide which source is the one you will follow, and update or archive the other if you have the authority to. Cairn can take actions, and those actions are approval-gated. A flag is not permission for the app to delete the losing document.

On-device, with a caveat about connections

Cairn runs on the Mac. Indexing a file on disk is a local act. Connecting Slack or Notion means those products are involved in providing what you connect. We do not describe Cairn as a way to stop Slack from being Slack. We describe it as an assistant that answers on your machine, with a citation, after it has indexed what you gave it.

If the corpus itself is a mess — duplicates, outdated docs — the citations will faithfully point at the mess. That is what the knowledge health report is for, and it is the next note.