Confidence & the one rule

Every fire may carry a confidence envelope. Its basis says what kind of claim the number is — and four of the five bases can never carry an interval at all.

Basis	What it means	May carry an interval?
exact	a deterministic validator passed; point is 1.0 by construction	no
fixture	this detector version’s measured precision on a seeded corpus	no
calibrated	a calibration artifact licenses the bound	yes — and only this one
reported	the detector’s raw score, explicitly unlicensed	no
insufficient	a refusal: no number at all	no

The one rule

That counting is the point. Because the refusal is recorded in confidence_refused on the row, “this detector reported no confidence” and “this layer declined to record the confidence it reported” are different facts — on the row and on the page. A system that silently dropped the interval and kept the point would erase that distinction, and the erased version reads as the more confident one.

exact does not mean “certainly a card”

The same distinction applies to media.inventory, whose exact basis means the parse found a part at a known path — a deterministic read of the request bytes, saying nothing whatever about what the part contains.

A calibrated bound changes what threshold means

This is a behavior change that arrives from an artifact activation rather than a config edit, so it is worth stating plainly.

A finding’s score is the licensed point when one exists, in preference to the raw signal. A calibrated point is a version-level aggregate, so while a bound is licensed every finding of that detector version carries the same number. Two consequences:

• threshold becomes an on/off switch — any value at or below the licensed point admits every finding, any value above it admits none.
• severity_bands cannot separate a strong hit from a weak one, because there is no such distinction left to separate. A low/medium/high ladder collapses to one rung.

And the calibrated point is not a per-finding probability. It is the version-level share of this detector’s findings adjudicated true positive on one segment and one endpoint — constant across every finding the version produces, and never averaged across coordinates the detector cannot observe.

Four detectors never spend a calibrated bound at all

pii.card, pii.crypto, pii.iban and pii.mac carry only exact rules — a checksum, a Luhn digit, or a fixed structural form — so no calibration artifact is ever consulted for them, on either lane. Their threshold and severity_bands always read the raw signal and mean the same thing buffered or streamed.

No interval is ever rendered for an adversarial category

This is a rule, not a gap awaiting work. injection.heuristic and injection.judge are permanently reported, and three independent code paths refuse an interval there.

insufficient is a first-class outcome

A page that shows insufficient is working correctly. It is not an error state, not a fallback, and not a 0.0 in disguise — it is the layer declining to state a number it does not have evidence for.

localhost:9090/ui/honestySynthetic traffic

The same discipline governs the measured figures the detectors themselves publish: below a denominator of 20, the harness refuses to render a rate as a decimal, and prints a tally instead. pii.ssn’s recall rests on 10 positives; pii.iban’s and pii.phone’s on 6. A perfect tally on a small corpus is the most quotable and the least honest number this layer could emit, which is exactly why it is not rendered as one.