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Signal provenance
Every number says where it came from: measured, estimated or unavailable.
Every number Prism shows carries a record of where it came from. That is why Prism sometimes shows you nothing.
The problem
A dashboard that says "Test coverage: 62%" without saying whether that was measured, estimated, stale, or a default is decoration — or worse, confident fiction.
What Prism does
| Provenance | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Measured | Prism ran something, or read a real artefact |
| Derived | Computed from the index by a deterministic rule |
| Estimated | Inferred from indirect evidence — directionally useful |
| Unavailable | Prism does not know, and will not pretend to |
| Heuristic | A useful rule (follow-through, reuse score) that is not a parse |
| Inferred | Feature membership or similar-by-name — not load-bearing until you open the file |
Graph edges on Intelligence tools carry measured | heuristic | inferred.
Surfaces show this: fields in --json and MCP results, labels in the CLI. Estimated figures are labelled; unavailable ones are absent rather than
zero.
Unavailable is a real answer
No git history → no ownership section (not "0 contributors"). No coverage
report → no coverage figure (not 0%). A zero and an absence mean different
things.
Estimated is honest, not useless
Ownership and churn on a shallow clone are marked estimated or unavailable, never shown as zero.