Tiers and confidence
Two different questions about the same edge: where it came from, and how sure the extractor is about it. Keeping them apart is what stops a confident guess from reading like a fact.
Tier: where the edge came from
| Tier | Shown in the app as | Means |
|---|---|---|
TierDECLARED | Shown in the app asRead from config | MeansRead straight out of static configuration: formula text, layout XML, a workflow definition, a permission set's own file. The system says so itself. |
TierOBSERVED | Shown in the app asObserved | MeansRead from runtime signals or integration-layer configuration: API traffic, permission surfaces, a sync's own field mapping. |
TierINFERRED | Shown in the app asMatched by name | MeansDerived by Meshie from other edges and evidence, rather than read or observed directly. |
Tier is about provenance, not strength. An observed edge is not a weaker declared edge: it answers a different question. Declared configuration tells you what the system is set up to do; runtime signals tell you what it actually did. Both are worth having, and conflating them would hide which one you are looking at.
Confidence: how sure the extractor is
A number from 0 to 1, per edge. An exact, unambiguous reference in configuration is 1. A match that required a heuristic (a name that resolves to more than one candidate, a string that looks like a field reference) is lower, and the number is shown rather than rounded away.
Confidence and tier move independently. A declared edge can have low confidence if the configuration it was read from is ambiguous. An observed edge can have confidence 1 if the runtime signal named its target exactly.
Why both are on screen
Every reference row in an impact result shows its type, tier, confidence and the file it came from. That is more than most people need most of the time, and exactly what the one person who disagrees with the result needs in order to check it.
- A declared, confidence-1 edge with a file path is not a claim you have to trust. It is a claim you can open.
- A low-confidence edge is a prompt to look, not a result to act on blindly.
Neither tier nor confidence covers the case where a reference cannot be resolved at all. That has its own mechanism, and it outranks both: see Unknown edges.