Citations over vibes

An agent answer has two parts: the claim and the provenance. Teams that only audit the claim stay slow, because every review requires a human to re-derive the facts. Teams that demand provenance review at reading speed.

The citation contract

When an agent answers from shared knowledge, it should be able to state:

• which document the claim came from,
• which lines support it,
• which revision of that document was current when it read them.

Immutable revisions make this possible: if content can change under a citation, the citation is decoration.

What changes in practice

1. Review becomes spot-checking. You read the cited five lines instead of trusting a paragraph. 2 Disagreements become resolvable. "The bundle says X" beats "I remember deciding X" - and the bundle can be corrected once for every agent.
2. Hallucinations get caught by construction. An agent that cannot produce a citation for a project-specific claim is guessing, and you now have a reliable signal for exactly when to double-check.