FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Direct answers — the same ones we'd give in a technical conversation.
- Is this RAG?
- No. RAG retrieves passages for a prompt at request time. It has no concept of an immutable, versioned fact state, no freshness horizon, and no authority binding to the source. AIality maintains a Reality layer independent of any one prompt or retrieval — RAG can sit on top of it, but doesn't replace it.
- Is this search?
- No. Search finds documents. It doesn't track whether a specific fact inside a document changed, and it doesn't preserve what a source said historically. AIality resolves a specific, versioned answer to a specific question, with a record of what changed and when.
- Why not just call the vendor API or re-scrape the page?
- A live call answers "what does this say right now." It can't answer "what did this say when my agent decided," or "has anything changed since" — because it keeps no durable record. AIality's exact states are immutable and addressable by id specifically so those two questions stay answerable after the fact.
- What happens when a fact changes?
- A new observation produces a new, immutable FactStateVersion — the old one is never edited or deleted. The two states are compared and classified (value / status / assurance / authority changed), and that classification is what a Change event records. See /docs/changes and /docs/impact.
- What does Freshness mean?
- Whether an exact state is still within the validity horizon it was given at creation: FRESH, STALE, or UNKNOWN. It's evaluated live, at read time, and kept deliberately separate from the exact state itself, which never changes. See /docs/freshness.
- Can an agent rely on old Reality?
- It can always inspect it — old states are never deleted. Whether it should act on it without rechecking is exactly what Freshness answers. A STALE state isn't wrong, it's a signal that revalidation is expected to be in flight or due.
- What is Authority?
- The explicit, versioned binding of an exact state to the source surface that produced it — BOUND or UNBOUND, never a numeric confidence score. UNBOUND means exactly what it says: no reviewed binding governs that state's source yet. See /docs/authority.
- What is a Reality Lock?
- A durable, auditable record of the exact Reality basis a decision or action used — not a claim that Reality is frozen, and not a permanent approval. It can be assessed later to check whether the basis it locked has since changed. See /docs/reality-locks.
- Does AIality make decisions for my agent?
- No. AIality resolves Reality. Your application or agent interprets it, applies its own policy, decides, acts, and measures the outcome. AIality doesn't own that layer and doesn't try to.
- How is AIality different from an agent framework?
- An agent framework orchestrates reasoning and tool calls. It has no opinion on whether an external fact it's reasoning about is still current, or what it said historically. AIality is the layer underneath that question — a framework or a hand-rolled agent can both call it the same way, over REST or MCP.