/ax-audit

Agent output with no rationale or sources

Agent says "You should refactor this function" with no explanation. User can't evaluate the advice: follows it blindly or ignores it. Neither builds trust.

What goes wrong

Agent responds with a confident directive and nothing else. User can't tell if it came from docs, past conversations, or hallucination. One wrong answer and they stop trusting all responses, having never had a way to tell good from bad.

Detection

Surfaces: agent-chat, agent-dashboard

Auditability: hybrid

Static signals:

1. Find agent output components (role="assistant", <AssistantMessage>, <AiResponse>).
2. Check whether consequential claims expose supporting sources or a concise user-facing rationale, inline or through source components.
3. Flag missing support for a consequential claim, not the absence of a particular child component. Internal reasoning need not be displayed.

Concrete commands:

rg -l 'role.*assistant|AssistantMessage|AiResponse|completion' --type=ts src/
rg -A 15 'role.*assistant|<AssistantMessage|<AiResponse' --type=ts src/ | rg -v 'Citation|Source|Reasoning|Thinking'
rg -n "type === ['\"](reasoning|source-url|source-document)|filter\(.*type === ['\"]text" --type=ts src/

Judgment signals:

• Even if <Sources> exists, check whether it's populated vs. always empty.
• Rationale is needed where it helps assess a consequential recommendation; routine status or self-contained answers need no extra panel.
• Dropping source parts can remove claim support. Omitting private reasoning is not itself a defect; inspect the user-facing explanation and sources.

False-positive guards:

• Skip // ax-audit-ignore:trust-no-confidence-cues, test, and Storybook files.
• Skip status-only messages ("Done!" confirmations).

Fix

Expose relevant sources and a concise decision rationale. Do not require private chain-of-thought or a thinking panel.

Examples

Anti-pattern (fails):

<div className="agent-response" role="assistant">
  <Markdown>{completion.text}</Markdown>
</div>

Applied (passes):

<div className="agent-response" role="assistant">
  <Markdown>{completion.text}</Markdown>
  {completion.explanation && <p>{completion.explanation}</p>}
  {completion.sources.length > 0 && <CitationList sources={completion.sources} />}
</div>

Default tier and overrides

Defaults to: fix-this-sprint

Suppression

{/* ax-audit-ignore:trust-no-confidence-cues, status-only messages need no rationale */}
<AgentMessage content={statusText} />