What Ask will and will not do#
Ask Evodira answers only from permitted, reviewed memory. Every answer is cited to its evidence, and it abstains when the proof is thin. It is not a search box over your files, and it is not a chatbot with your documents in its context. The retrieval is permission-filtered inside the query, so an answer is assembled only from evidence you are entitled to see.
That has a consequence people find surprising at first: Evodira will tell you it does not know. An abstention is a correct answer, not a failure, and the product treats it as a first-class result with its own screen.
Asking#
Open Ask
/console/ask, the Ask your organisational memory field in the console header, / from anywhere in the console, or ⌘K then the ask action.
Ask a question, not a keyword
The examples the page offers are the right shape: What is our rollback process?, Who should be consulted during an Atlas incident?, What continuity gaps are still open? A bare noun gives the retriever nothing to be specific about.
Read the header before the prose
The line above the answer carries the certificate state and the confidence percentage. Both are covered below, and both change how much weight the sentence beneath deserves.
The same question can be asked on the device, against local memory, without the console:
evodira-local ask 'what is our rollback process?'Reading an answer#
The certificate line
- Certified · chain intact
- The provenance certificate was retrieved and verified this session. The claim-to-evidence chain holds.
- Unverified
- A certificate exists but could not be confirmed this session.
- Certificate unavailable
- The certificate could not be retrieved at all, so the chain was neither confirmed nor broken. That is a different statement from “unverified”, and the console keeps them apart deliberately.
The four trust metrics
Expand Show why under the answer. Confidence is one number over four independent readings, and they fail in different ways.
| Metric | Asks | Low means |
|---|---|---|
| Coverage | How much of the question the evidence actually addresses. | You asked something broader than what has been captured. Narrow it. |
| Support | How many independent pieces of evidence back the assertion. | One source is carrying the whole answer. Read it yourself. |
| Freshness | How recent that evidence is. | The answer may describe how things used to work. The summary line says current evidence, mixed freshness, or older evidence. |
| Authority | Whether the evidence comes from sources with standing on this subject. | It is drawn from passing mentions rather than from the runbook or the decision record. |
Beside them, Access · Permission checked is always yes: the retriever is permission-scoped by construction, never filtered afterwards.
Citations
Every sentence traces to evidence. Follow a citation to the fragment it quotes, and from there to the evidence object in Evidence. If an answer matters, read at least one citation before acting on it. That is what they are for.
When sources disagree#
If the reviewed sources contradict each other, Evodira will not assert a single answer. You get an amber conflict notice: “the reviewed sources below disagree with each other”, with both sides listed. Read them before relying on anything.
A conflict is a job, not a glitch
Contradiction in memory means two claims that both passed review say different things. Take it to Review, whose claim decision screen lists open conflicts on an asset, and resolve which one is true. Leaving it means every future answer on the subject abstains.
The four ways it abstains#
| Reason shown | What happened | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| No related reviewed memory found | Nothing relevant exists in verified memory at all. | Raise a capture request, or ask somebody who knows and get it captured. |
| Insufficient evidence | Related matches exist but none carry enough reviewed evidence to answer. | Ask a narrower question, or check whether the relevant claims are still sitting in the review queue. |
| Limited by your permissions | Related memory exists, but none of it is within your permissions. | Ask whoever administers the workspace. The evidence is there; your role does not reach it. |
| Sources disagree | Contested. No single answer will be asserted. | Resolve the conflict in Review. |
The abstention screen also shows what Evodira actually checked: confidence, the reason, how many related items it reviewed, that permission was checked, and whether source quotes were available. The items listed underneath are labelled clearly: they are not citations for an answer, they are nearby matches it reviewed before abstaining. Each carries why it matched and why it was insufficient.
Closing a gap#
Every abstention offers four routes out, and the first is the one that makes the product better.
- Create capture request asks for the missing knowledge to be captured. The request is prefilled from your question, so a question about who handles something becomes a request for exactly that.
- Ask a narrower question is the most common fix for insufficient evidence.
- Search Memory Map, because the graph may hold a relationship even where no prose claim does.
- Review related memory, for stewards: the answer may be sitting in your own queue, undecided.
Track what became of your requests under My contributions.
Asking well#
- Name the thing. “Atlas rollback” beats “rollback”, because the retriever can be specific about a named project.
- Ask one question at a time. Two questions in one sentence reliably lowers coverage, because the evidence answers half of what you asked.
- Prefer the question you would ask a colleague. Who owns, what happens when, why did we decide. Those map onto the claim types the product extracts.
- Treat low support as a prompt to read. One source behind a confident-sounding sentence is the case where citations earn their keep.
You are done when
You can get a cited answer, name what each of the four trust metrics is telling you, tell the four abstention reasons apart, and turn an abstention into a capture request rather than a shrug.
Something here wrong, missing, or no longer true of the product? Write to hello@evodira.com. Documentation that has drifted from the console is a bug and we treat it as one.