Concepts

Verified vs Asserted

What asserted, caveat, and verified mean for a ClariLayer context entry, and why v1 reconcile records caveat or leaves an entry asserted instead of stamping verified.

ClariLayer is a trust product. The entire point is that your AI's context about your data is grounded against reality, not just asserted. That only works if ClariLayer is precise about what it can stand behind — so it labels every saved context entry with a status, and it is careful never to claim more than it can back. This page explains exactly what each status means.

The three statuses

Every context entry carries one of three statuses. Two are live today; one is on the roadmap.

asserted (live)

asserted is the neutral baseline — the honest "we are taking your word for it." It is not a claim that an entry is right, and it is not a claim that an entry is wrong. It simply means the entry has not been contradicted.

An entry is asserted in any of three cases:

it was never reconciled, so nothing has been checked;
it was reconciled, but its SQL yielded no applicable checks, so there was nothing checkable; or
it was reconciled, every applicable check passed, but the strong verified mark is gated off in v1 — so a would-be verified match is recorded as asserted.

Because of case 3, asserted does not mean "never checked." A clean reconcile pass still reads asserted today. The important thing asserted tells you is: not flagged, not stamped.

caveat (live)

caveat is the status reconcile assigns when an entry's declared signals (from its SQL) and the actual warehouse result mismatch. It is a flagged "treat this with care."

A caveat is the valuable signal, not an error. It means ClariLayer caught a definition whose stored shape no longer matches the data it claims to produce — exactly the drift that makes two reports disagree. When your agent recalls an entry with a caveat, it should carry that caveat into its answer.

verified (roadmap, not live)

verified is the strong trust mark for an entry whose declared signals fully matched a real warehouse sample. It is not shipped today. The mark is gated off in v1, and a would-be verified outcome is deliberately downgraded to asserted.

You will not see a verified status on a ClariLayer entry today, and ClariLayer's marketing does not show a live "Verified" badge. verified is the documented trajectory — it returns when a real SQL parser replaces the current heuristic — but it is the roadmap, never the present.

Why verified is gated off

It would be easy to stamp entries verified and look more impressive. ClariLayer deliberately does not, and the reason is the core of the product's honesty.

The thing that would back a verified mark is extracting the declared signals from an entry's SQL — reasoning about what the query says it should produce. Today that extraction is a hand-rolled heuristic over SQL text. A heuristic cannot be made sound against the long tail of SQL dialect edge cases, and a single false verified is the one failure mode a trust product cannot ship: it would tell you a wrong definition is correct, which is worse than saying nothing.

So ClariLayer makes the safe trade. Over-flagging is harmless — a caveat just tells you to look. A false all-clear is not. ClariLayer therefore caps every reconcile result at caveat or asserted and waits for a real SQL-parser fast-follow before it turns verified on.

What this means for your agent

When your agent recalls context, it should read the status and act on it:

asserted — usable context, but not independently checked. Fine to ground on; do not present it as proven.
caveat — a known mismatch. Carry the caveat into the answer so the reader knows what to distrust.
verified — you will not see this today. If you ever do in a future version, it will mean a real parser confirmed the declared shape against a sample.

The honest framing for users is: ClariLayer reconciles your context against your real warehouse results and flags caveats — it is evidence-backed and caveat-aware, not blindly asserted. "Verified" is where it is going, not a promise it makes today.