How grounding works

The claim ledger is the only factual substrate the writer is given. Everything else in draft exists to make that ledger trustworthy.

The gate

Each source section is mined for claims. A claim is a short factual statement plus the span of source text that supports it. Verify applies nine checks in order and returns the first failure as its reason:

1. The claim and its quote are both non-empty.
2. The quote is at least 12 runes long.
3. The quote is valid UTF-8.
4. The quote holds no replacement character.
5. The quote occurs in the source.
6. The quote does not end mid-clause.
7. The claim type is one of the accepted kinds.
8. The claim strength is one of the accepted values.
9. Every numeric token in the claim also appears in the quote.

Anything else is dropped and counted. A thin source visibly yields a thin ledger rather than a padded one.

Why checks 3 and 4 exist

Quote matching normalises both sides — lowercased, whitespace collapsed, smart quotes folded — so a sentence wrapped across lines or split by a column gutter still verifies. That tolerance is necessary: PDF text extraction produces both constantly, and byte-exact matching would drop true claims from every real paper.

But normalisation is lossy in one dangerous way. strings.ToLower maps every invalid UTF-8 byte to the replacement character, so two different invalid byte sequences normalise to the same text — and a fabricated quote could match a source it does not occur in. A fuzzer found it. Requiring the quote to be valid UTF-8 and free of replacement characters closes it, because normalisation can only ever introduce that character, never any other.

Whitespace collapsing carries no equivalent risk: a run of spaces collapses to one, never to none, so a b can never match ab.

After the writing

A finished draft is checked twice more. The house rules cover structure, the word band, banned vocabulary and emoji. The faithfulness pass cross-checks the article against the ledger that grounded it — flagging a metric term no claim supports, an ending that does not close a sentence, and near-duplicate paragraphs, with ungrounded numbers and over-stated hedges reported as warnings.

A violation triggers a targeted rewrite, not a shrug.

Resume cannot weaken this

--resume reuses a ledger from an earlier attempt, but it re-verifies every record against the freshly re-read sources first. A resumed ledger is trusted because it still passes the same gate, not because draft wrote it. Edit a source underneath and the records it no longer supports are dropped.