A citation here is a document,
a line span, and the words themselves

Most software that cites does so after the fact: it writes the answer, then looks for something to attach to it. Here the order is reversed. The citation exists first — a passage found in your documents — and the answer is that passage, cut to three lines. There is nothing to attach because nothing was written.

A citation with any one of the three missing would not be a citation. An id without lines is a hint. Lines without the text are homework. Text without either is what everybody else ships.

The document the citation names is a readable Markdown copy sitting on your own disk, made by the conversion half of the product from a file you already had. The original is never altered; conversion writes a new file and leaves the source byte for byte as it was. So what you open is the copy, and the copy carries a note of where it came from and how it was read.

That last part matters when the source was paper. If the original was a scan, the words in the copy are what the machine read off the page, and machines misread paper. The archive OCR run done so far — 7,996 documents, 35,633 pages (counted) — was done entirely on the machine with nothing sent out. But a citation into a page read by OCR is a citation into the machine's reading, not the ink. When the figure matters, check it against the scan. And in the proving corpora, scanned paper is mostly not searchable yet: one company's OCR queue stands at 0 of 883 candidates read, and photographed documents are held as media only.

The engine will quote at most three lines and attach at most two citations. Those are constants in its source. They read like limits. They are a promise.

Three lines is what a person can check in the time it takes to open a file. A ten-line answer is a summary, and a summary is something the software composed — which is exactly what this product refuses to do. If your question needs more than three lines to answer, the right result is two citations to two places and you reading both, or a refusal. Not a longer paragraph.

Two citations is the same rule from the other side. An answer that needs five sources to hold it up is an argument, and the engine does not make arguments. It finds the best passage, and at most one more, and shows them to you.

The answer is a line out of your document, not a sentence about it. Every choice on this page comes back to that sentence.

One more thing a citation does not tell you: who wrote the document, or whether it was right when they wrote it. A citation says where the words are. It does not say the words are true. Provenance — the path, the extraction method, the status, and for a scan the reading confidence — is the next page, and the difference between provenance and authorship is the point of it.