The five-rung trust ladder
What she’s allowed to believe, sorted by where it came from.
Every claim Alix might assert sits on one of five rungs, and the rung decides how far she can lean on it. T1 is the base model’s own knowledge, permanently untrusted, the thing most likely to hand you a confident, tidy, false answer. T2 is her verified experience, the tier that makes her her. T3 is a large offline archive that works with no internet. T4 is live web search she hosts herself. And T5 is the one that always wins: ask me.
A claim has to climb before she’ll state it as fact, and the top rung isn’t a failure state, it’s the feature. A system that can say “I don’t know, go ask you” is one you can stop double-checking.
The full story: the nightly forgetting cycle, and the fact-checker whose own verdicts got read back as truth until she denied her own finished work, is in Memory and forgetting.