The Answer Engine: one question in, a grounded, source-checked read out

A question about the future. Trimmed; must be at least 5 characters.

true → return a claim ticket immediately (202) and compute in the background; collect at GET /api/answer/{ticketId}. Default false (synchronous).

true → force a new synthesis instead of serving the maintained record's recent answer to the same question. Default false: a repeat of a recently-answered question returns the SAME stored state (servedFrom:"maintained-record", same permalink id) — the shared-state property, by design. An identical question repeated within 10 minutes against an unchanged record is one Read. — so passing true also opts out of that, buying new work at the published rate.

Optional. The observer this question is asked as (the O of Time, Observer, Watch, Rule). Recorded as declared on the answer's replay block; default "public". A malformed value is named in replay.declared.rejected, never applied.

Optional. The Watch this question is asked under. Recorded as declared on the answer's replay block; default none.

2–3 short paragraphs separated by blank lines. Carries no probability of Signal Bureau's own (removed 2026-08-19); any percentage in the prose is the market's or a source's, attributed.

Capped by verification, never independent of it (2026-09-07). Unless verified is exactly true AND verifiedBlockedBy is empty, this reads "low" and unverified carries the reason in words — a cannot-measure verdict may never render as the strongest trust signal we emit. The synthesis model's own self-assessment is an input to that ceiling, never the output.

Source-check verdict from the second model pass; null when verification was unavailable. Three states, never two: true = checked and located, false = checked and not located, null = could not check. Both false and null cap confidence at low; only null sets verificationAbstained.

Present only when this reply was served FROM the record instead of synthesized fresh. 'maintained-record': this question was answered recently (~60 min) and you are reading that SAME state under the same permalink id — the shared-state property, and a Read like any other. 'recent-identical-ask': YOUR OWN key asked this exact question inside the published window and the record has not moved, so no work was done and no Read was receipted — An identical question repeated within 10 minutes against an unchanged record is one Read. It is scoped to your key: one key is never served, and never spared a charge, from another key's answers. Pass {"fresh": true} for new work, metered as new work.

When this reply was served from the record. Its companion answeredAt is when the answer it serves was produced — the gap between them is the age, with no arithmetic.

What happened to the prose. 'verified': the verdict cleared and the text is untouched. 'as-written': the verdict did not clear but nothing in the text states more than the sources establish, so it is served unchanged. 'evidence-bounded': every sentence stating more than the cited sources establish was removed whole and the rest served verbatim, with a disclosure line saying a statement was withheld — and also the state served when the verification pass could not run at all (verificationReason 'verifier-unavailable') over an answer that has evidence: the mechanical strength check still bounds the prose, so the text is held to what the citations carry, but no verifier read it. 'abstained': the conclusion was withheld and a labeled statement served in its place (opens 'Withheld:'). Guarantee: when verificationReason is 'overstated' this is never 'verified' or 'as-written'; when the verifier did not run it is never 'verified' or 'as-written' either; and an abstention always carries abstained: true, confidence: 'low' (no response carries a probability field — answers state no probability of ours). Verifier language reaches a caller only inside the labeled abstention, never spliced into reporting. Independently of the four values, every served factual sentence has passed the sentence-grounding gate: it is carried by one row of the record the writer saw (its key terms inside one source sentence of that row; its numbers, names and dates in that row), or it was removed whole — see sentenceGrounding. A verifier verdict never lets a sentence through on its own.

Whether the conclusion was withheld and an evidence summary served instead of a synthesized answer. Always a boolean, never null — this is OUR editorial decision taken at synthesis, not a reading of the world, so it has no cannot-measure state to report; see verificationState below for the field that does carry one. True exactly when servedAs is "abstained".

How many sentences of answer were served after the sentence-grounding gate. Null when the gate did not grade this prose (a house withholding, or no answer was written) — never a zero that reads as graded.

How many sentences of the drafted prose the sentence-grounding gate removed because no row of the grounding record carried them. The removed text is never published; the count is disclosed here and in words on unverified. Null when the gate did not grade this prose.

The single condition that set the confidence ceiling (the first entry of verifiedBlockedBy, or verifier-unavailable when the verdict itself is null). Null when nothing capped the answer.

The abstention, recorded (2026-09-07). True only for the cannot-measure verdict — verified: null, a check that could not run. A verdict of false is a check that ran and said no: a finding, not an abstention. Counting these rows gives the null-verification rate directly.

The same tri-state verdict as verified (true/false/null), spelled in words a machine can log or branch on without a lookup table: "verified", "unverified", or "cannot-measure" — the last meaning the check itself could not run, never that nothing was found. Additive; verified keeps its boolean-or-null shape unchanged.

The single token naming the pass that failed or could not run, drawn from the same vocabulary as verifiedBlockedBy (falling back to "verifier-flagged" or "verifier-unavailable" when the blocking list is empty). Null exactly when verificationState is "verified": a passing check has no reason to report. It also carries subject-untracked — emitted when nothing in the maintained record names the question's subject, so the answer was withheld rather than written from general knowledge (servedAs: "abstained", citations: [], verified: false). When it reads 'overstated', servedAs is 'evidence-bounded' or 'abstained' — the served text was re-graded before it shipped and contains no sentence above what the sources establish. When it reads 'verifier-unavailable' the verification pass did not run — the call is retried once inside its existing deadline before that state is declared — and the answer is served deterministically: verified null, verificationState 'cannot-measure', servedAs 'evidence-bounded' when the record holds evidence for the question and 'abstained' when it holds none. The same outage returns the same contract on every retry. When it reads 'writer-unavailable' the writing pass itself did not complete — the answer was never synthesized — so nothing was served in its place: servedAs is 'abstained', abstained true, verified null, verificationState 'cannot-measure', and any citations still listed are the evidence the answer would have been written from, named as such in the withholding text rather than offered as a checked basis. A writer outage is never reported as 'verifier-unavailable': no answer existed for the verifier to read. When it reads 'ungrounded' the sentence-grounding gate found no factual sentence of the drafted prose carried by any row of the grounding record: servedAs is 'abstained', the labeled withholding is served, verified is false and verificationState 'unverified' — or verified null and verificationState 'cannot-measure' when the gate had no rows to check against or could not run.

The version of the maintained record this answer was written against — a 16-hex-character content fingerprint over the topic record the answer cites as its principal receipt. Null when the question matched no published record, which is an honest "nothing to bind to" and never a placeholder that would compare equal to a real version later.

Whether this answer is still bound to the record state it cites. fresh = the record has not moved; unbound = no published record covers the question. A served answer whose record HAS moved (stale) or whose binding could not be computed (unknown) is never redistributed — it is re-synthesised against the record as it stands today, so these two values are visible on stored rows and audit events rather than on a served reply.

The published record slug recordVersion is computed over (e.g. "hormuz"). Null when nothing bound.

How many matched entities carried multi-week trend history.

Whether the answer was persisted (permalink available).

Shareable permalink id (/s/<id>); null if persistence was unavailable.

true when the answer was produced on a degraded path (a dependency was unavailable); the reason rides degradedReason.

Why the answer was produced on a degraded path.