Proofdesk

Retrieval chatbots guess. Ask one about contracts or policies and it can produce a fluent answer whether or not the documents support it. The wrong answer looks exactly like the right one. For a lawyer, operations lead, or support desk that must stand behind the result, that is worse than no answer. The important question is not how often the tool answers. It is whether an answer is allowed out when its evidence does not hold.

Proofdesk answers only from the documents a project owns. Each shipped answer includes the exact stored passages used as evidence. A verifier from a different vendor checks each extracted claim against all retrieved evidence, then a deterministic gate blocks the whole answer unless every claim is supported. If retrieval, drafting, verification, or storage fails, the desk returns an honest refusal. It never falls back to unchecked generation.

The product around that gate is real too: invited projects, owner-funded budgets, document upload, PDF citations, proof receipts, sharing, and a living-corpus console. Owners can add, replace, or remove documents, answer setup questions, inspect actual usage, see duplicate or contradiction flags, and read whether saved passages, document connections, and the broader knowledge view are current. Removed material stops serving new answers while old answer records stay honest.

Vercel authenticates and queues each question. An on-demand Linux Node runner executes embed, retrieve, bounded LOCAL or GLOBAL expansion, draft, verify, gate, and store. Embedding is pinned per project. The base search reads active passage vectors. Graph links add directly related documents. GLOBAL routing can reserve one existing evidence slot for a real passage selected through a community summary. The summary is only a routing hint. It cannot enter evidence, citations, or the proof pack.

A separate Python worker ingests documents and maintains extraction markers, exact document centroids, neighbor edges, communities, and quality flags. Updates are content-aware. One changed document does not force a blind full rebuild: current centroid identity and graph generations make staleness explicit. In acceptance, an independent full query matched the bounded result before and after restore. The console reads those persisted facts without starting work or changing whether Ask is available.

The latest valid stored v3 evaluation, run #35, measured 89.58 percent grounding across 48 answerable questions. Every answer that shipped was grounded. All 12 unanswerable questions refused, for 100 percent refusal correctness. Five answerable questions refused too. The 10.42 percent false-refusal rate is the measured cost of choosing no answer over an unsupported one.

The public example remains 342 documents and 4,400 passages. Separately, an authenticated public-safe synthetic tenant proves the storage and maintenance substrate at 997 documents, 9,798 passages, and 1,265,816 stored words. All 997 documents read back searchable, connected, and organized. A reversible one-document edit recomputed one centroid and 3 of 997 affected source neighborhoods, while an independent full query matched all 2,991 edges before and after restore.

The official 73-question LOCAL/GLOBAL pair is still withheld because the owner-funded OpenAI credit needed for that run is exhausted. A 13-question preflight improved GLOBAL, but it is not promoted to the headline metric. The scale tenant is generated fiction, not client data, and the missing paired claim stays missing until a stored run earns it.