Guide 4 — Currents
Currents
Live commentary, source-grounded or abstained
This documentation describes Theseus Codex's infrastructure and methodology. It does not expose private firm materials, uploaded source documents, or unreleased internal records.
- For
- Readers who want to understand how the firm comments on the day's events.
- Summary
- Currents is the firm's live commentary surface. A scheduler pulls recent public posts in, runs each through a significance floor and a relevance gate, and either writes a short citation-grounded opinion or abstains. Every published opinion satisfies eight structural invariants designed to prevent free-floating assertion and to keep private material out of public output.
The pipeline, top to bottom
The Currents scheduler runs continuously on a short cycle. Each cycle moves a candidate event through a fixed sequence.
- Discovery — recent high-engagement public posts are pulled in from the upstream feed.
- Significance floor — each candidate gets a significance score computed from impressions, retweets, likes, replies, and quote-and-bookmark counts (a weighted log-sum). Posts below the floor are dropped.
- Persistence and dedupe — survivors become event rows.
- Enrichment — the post is embedded, near-duplicate matched against recent events, and tagged with topic hints.
- Relevance gate — the event's fingerprint is compared against the firm's stored conclusions and claims. The gate requires at least two qualifying hits above a relevance threshold; otherwise the event becomes an abstention.
- Opinion generation — the retrieval bundle is wrapped in unambiguous markers and handed to a language model with a strict contract: cite each source by id and quote verbatim spans.
- Citation validation — every quoted span is checked against its source character by character. A fabrication anywhere causes the whole opinion to abstain.
- Strawman detection — a separate guard checks the opinion is not mischaracterizing the source post.
- Publication — the opinion row is written and the public feed picks it up immediately.
- Article dispatch — a separate, longer-cycle job periodically clusters related opinions and drafts a long-form article when the cluster is dense enough.
The eight structural invariants
An opinion that fails any of these is rejected before it reaches the public feed.
- Grounded — every non-trivial claim is backed by an inline citation to a firm conclusion or principle.
- Source-respecting — citations resolve only to publicly-safe corpus surfaces. Private material may inform internal reasoning but must not appear as a public citation target.
- Quorum — at least two relevance-cleared firm conclusions back the opinion. If the corpus cannot supply two, the system abstains rather than under-cite.
- Voice-consistent — the opinion is written in the firm's first-person voice rather than recapping or paraphrasing the source post.
- Event-anchored — each opinion is bound to exactly one event. Multi-event commentary lives in the articles pipeline.
- Revocable — every opinion is publishable iff its revocation timestamp is null. Operator revocation is the canonical inverse of publication; there is no separate "hide" flag.
- Abstention-honest — when the relevance gate fails, the system records a reason on the event and shows a public abstention. Abstentions are a public stance.
- Provenance-complete — each opinion ships an audit trail: source post, relevance scores, conclusions cited, generator parameters. The audit trail is addressable from the public page.
The audit trail
Below every opinion sit the source post, the cited conclusions (linked through to public pages — private conclusions never appear here), the relevance scores at generation time, generator metadata, and, if the opinion has been revoked, a banner indicating so. The opinion is hidden from the feed when revoked, but its row and audit trail remain readable for accountability.
Reader engagement
Each opinion has a follow-up thread for short questions and a separate public-response flow for structured replies — counter-evidence, counter-argument, clarification, or extension. Submitters who want their response published by name tick a publish-consent box; otherwise the firm holds the response as internal feedback.
A higher-effort form for invited expert critique exists alongside. Accepted high-severity critiques can earn a small bounty: the firm pays for being shown wrong, in public.