Provenance
Every load-bearing claim in a handover is labelled by where it came from · Stated, Inferred, or Unknown · so you never trust a confidence Soil didn't earn.
A handover that asserts without grounding is how drift sneaks back in. So every significant claim in a Soil handover carries a provenance label · an honest note of where it came from. This is the trust-first core of the product: Soil never shows a confidence it didn't earn.
The three labels you'll see
| Label | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Stated | Someone said it directly in the conversation · the user or the model asserted it. |
| Inferred | Soil (or the extracting model) reasonably deduced it from context, but no one stated it outright. |
| Unknown | The information is genuinely absent. Marked as a gap rather than invented. |
These three are the labels surfaced on any user-facing view. Internally the engine tracks a richer set (for example: repo-verified, observed, model-reported, user-confirmed, inferred, planned-only, blocked). That richer set always maps down to Stated / Inferred / Unknown before you see it.
“Verified” is special
Soil only labels something Verified when there is real proof · repo, runtime, or tool evidence · behind it. A model saying "this is done" is Stated, not Verified. We never promote a self-report to a proof.
Why it matters when you load
When you load a handover into a fresh model, the provenance labels tell you (and the model) how much to lean on each claim. "Architecture is X" marked Stated by you is solid ground. The same claim marked Inferred is a prompt to double-check. Unknown is an explicit "you'll need to find this out." That's the difference between a handover that compounds drift and one that contains it.
Working-style observations
Every save records how the work actually runs · the model's answers to a few situational questions, stored raw and shown honestly at load. Evidence, not adjectives.
Safe projections
Soil Cloud stores meaning, never secrets or raw prompts. Carry-meaning-not-verbatim is part of extraction, not a filter bolted on afterward.