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AI Confidence and Uncertainty

Show when an AI result is well supported and when it needs a human to look.

moderate AI Safety & Trust

What it adds

An uncertainty signal on AI outputs, derived from evidence quality, that changes what the workflow does next.

What your agent is told to do

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  1. 1

    Derive the signal from things the app can observe: how much supporting evidence was found, whether sources conflict, whether required fields came back empty, and whether the output matched the expected structure. Do not derive it from the model's own self-assessment, which is unreliable and tends to be confident about fabrications.

  2. 2

    Express the result as a small number of named bands, such as well supported, partial, conflicting, and needs review. Bands are honest about the granularity available; a percentage implies a calibration nobody has measured.

  3. 3

    Make the band change behaviour, not just appearance. Low-confidence results stay as drafts requiring approval, route into a review queue, or block downstream automation, while well-supported ones can flow through under the app's existing rules.

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    Show the reason for the band on the surface itself, in words, and let the user open the supporting evidence. Provenance and the links themselves are owned by AI Source Citations; this feature owns the judgement about how well that evidence holds up.

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    Do not bury the signal in a tooltip or a hover state. Uncertainty that only appears when someone goes looking for it will be missed by exactly the users who most needed the warning.

Edge cases it handles

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  • A raw probability presented as a calibrated confidence score is misleading, because nothing in the pipeline has been calibrated against outcomes. Use bands with stated meanings instead of an invented number.
  • The band must be tied to concrete causes such as missing evidence, sources that disagree with each other, or an ambiguous mapping onto the expected output shape, and the interface must name the cause rather than showing a bare label.
  • Uncertainty hidden behind a tooltip, an icon, or a hover is functionally invisible on touch devices and to screen reader users, and must be part of the visible text.
  • If the band does not change what the workflow does, it is decoration. A result marked as needing review must actually be prevented from being applied automatically.
  • Users must be able to open the evidence behind any band, including the case where the evidence is thin, because the absence of support is itself the finding.
  • A model refusal, a timeout, or a truncated response is not low confidence, it is no result. Show it as a failure with a retry, not as a hedged answer.
  • Structured output that fails validation must land in the lowest band and never be applied, even when the prose around it reads convincingly.
  • The band must be stored with the result, so a record reviewed later shows the uncertainty it carried at the time rather than being re-scored against today's data.

Definition of done

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  • Every AI result carries one of a small set of named uncertainty bands.
  • The band is computed from observable evidence quality, not from the model's self-report.
  • The stated reason for the band is visible in text, without hovering.
  • Low-confidence results are held as drafts or routed for review and cannot trigger downstream automation.
  • Supporting evidence is inspectable from every result, including results with little support.
  • Refusals, timeouts, and invalid structured output are presented as failures rather than uncertain answers.
  • The band is persisted alongside the result and shown on later review.
  • The feature matches the existing design system.
  • No existing functionality is broken.

Related features

How it works

  1. 1

    Copy the link

    Grab the Markdown instruction URL for this feature.

  2. 2

    Give it to your AI

    Paste it into Claude Code, Cursor, v0, Lovable — whatever you build with.

  3. 3

    It inspects, then implements

    Your agent reads your existing app first, then adds the feature to fit it.

Works with your stack

These instructions are written to adapt. They tell the agent to detect your framework, match your existing design system, and reuse what you already have — rather than assuming a particular stack.

Need it tighter than that? Customize the feature and tell it exactly what you're running.