/ax-audit

Agent presents everything with equal certainty

Agent is 95% sure of one recommendation, 40% of another, but both render identically. When the 40% answer is wrong, the user distrusts not just it but everything. Confident wrong answers cause permanent trust damage.

What goes wrong

Two recommendations in one response: one well-supported, one a guess. Same font, weight, formatting. User treats both as equally reliable; the guess is wrong; now they second-guess every future response. Trust is binary when the interface gives no gradient.

Detection

Surfaces: agent-chat

Auditability: observational

Static signals:

1. Find agent output containers.
2. Check for confidence props (confidence, certainty, score) or uncertainty components.
3. Absence of all = flag.

Concrete commands:

rg 'confidence|certainty|ConfidenceBadge|UncertaintyIndicator' --type=ts src/

Judgment signals:

• Hedging in prompt instructions is weaker than structured indicators but better than nothing.
• A badge always showing "high" is not meaningful: check for actual variation.

False-positive guards:

• Skip // ax-audit-ignore:trust-no-uncertainty-markers, test, and Storybook files.
• Skip trivial outputs (confirmations, acknowledgments) where confidence is always 100%.

Fix

Add confidence indicators: numeric score, visual badge (high/medium/low), hedging language, or expandable reasoning that shows uncertainty.

Examples

Anti-pattern (fails):

<ul>
  {recommendations.map((rec) => (
    <li key={rec.id}>{rec.text}</li>
  ))}
</ul>

Applied (passes):

<ul>
  {recommendations.map((rec) => (
    <li key={rec.id}>
      {rec.text}
      <ConfidenceBadge level={rec.confidence > 0.8 ? "high" : "low"} />
    </li>
  ))}
</ul>

Default tier and overrides

Defaults to: fix-this-sprint

No tool-execution bump. Hedging in prose changes nothing about what a tool did, and an observational rule that can only return unknown on static evidence should not be the single finding that flips a verdict. The blockers on that surface are the gate, its payload, and the escape hatch.

Suppression

{/* ax-audit-ignore:trust-no-uncertainty-markers, deterministic lookups, no uncertainty */}
<AgentRecommendation text={result.text} />