[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":94},["ShallowReactive",2],{"article-blog_en-\u002Fblog\u002Fconfidence-scores":3,"tag-counts-blog_en":92},{"id":4,"title":5,"author":6,"body":7,"category":6,"cover":79,"coverAlt":80,"date":81,"description":82,"draft":83,"extension":84,"meta":85,"navigation":86,"path":87,"seo":88,"stem":89,"tags":90,"updated":6,"__hash__":91},"blog_en\u002Fblog\u002Fconfidence-scores.md","Why we don't show confidence scores",null,{"type":8,"value":9,"toc":72},"minimark",[10,14,17,22,25,33,36,40,43,46,55,59,66,69],[11,12,13],"p",{},"Open any document-extraction tool and you'll find a small percentage next to each value it produces. 0.92. Sometimes shaded a reassuring green. It looks like information.",[11,15,16],{},"I want to argue that it isn't — at least not information you can use — and that building it anyway taught us what to build instead.",[18,19,21],"h2",{"id":20},"what-can-you-do-with-092","What can you do with 0.92?",[11,23,24],{},"Suppose the tool read a bid price off a scanned proposal and tells you it's 92% confident. What is your next move?",[11,26,27,28,32],{},"You can't ship the number — 8% doubt on a price is not a rounding error, it's a different bidder winning. You can't dismiss it either; 92% is usually right. The score doesn't tell you whether ",[29,30,31],"em",{},"this"," value is wrong, only that some values like it sometimes are. So you do the only sensible thing: you open the PDF and check. The percentage changed nothing about your afternoon.",[11,34,35],{},"Worse, it changes something about your habits. A score invites you to read \"0.92\" as \"probably fine\" and skip the check — and the values most likely to be wrong are precisely the ones that looked plausible enough to pass a skim. The failure mode of a confidence score is not that it's inaccurate. It's that it talks you out of verifying at exactly the moment verification was the whole point.",[18,37,39],{"id":38},"the-honest-version-of-confidence","The honest version of confidence",[11,41,42],{},"Here's the thing we kept coming back to while building Docabra: when a person checks a value, they are not asking \"how sure are you.\" They are asking \"where did you read this.\" The first question has no actionable answer. The second one does.",[11,44,45],{},"So the honest form of confidence is not a number, it's provenance. Either the tool can point at the exact words it read — the page, the sentence — or it should admit it can't. A value it can't point to is a value you check yourself. That's binary, and it's actionable: instead of reviewing ninety-two percent of a table, you review the cells with no source attached, which is usually a handful.",[11,47,48,49,54],{},"We call this click-to-source: every cell keeps the words it was read from, and clicking the cell brings those words up, highlighted on the original page. Scanned document or born-digital, same thing. There's a ",[50,51,53],"a",{"href":52},"\u002Fworkbench?template=bid-comparison","working example with six real proposals"," if you want to feel the difference rather than read about it.",[18,56,58],{"id":57},"checking-is-the-job","Checking is the job",[11,60,61,62,65],{},"The deeper lesson was about what extraction is ",[29,63,64],{},"for",". Nobody wants a table of values; they want a table they can sign off on. The tool's job is not to be right so often that you stop checking — no tool gets there, and pretending otherwise just moves the errors to where you won't catch them. The job is to make checking cheap enough that you actually do it: blanks first, outliers second, and every value one click from its evidence.",[11,67,68],{},"Confidence scores optimize for the demo. Provenance optimizes for the second Tuesday, when someone on the evaluation committee asks where a number came from and you have an answer in two seconds instead of an afternoon.",[11,70,71],{},"That's why there's no percentage next to our cells. There's a door back to the page instead.",{"title":73,"searchDepth":74,"depth":74,"links":75},"",2,[76,77,78],{"id":20,"depth":74,"text":21},{"id":38,"depth":74,"text":39},{"id":57,"depth":74,"text":58},"\u002Fcovers\u002Fconfidence-scores.jpg","Pencil-sketch illustration of a magnifying glass over a highlighted sentence in a document.","2026-08-06","Every extraction tool puts a little percentage next to each value. You can't act on it. So we built something you can act on instead — the source of every cell.",false,"md",{},true,"\u002Fblog\u002Fconfidence-scores",{"title":5,"description":82},"blog\u002Fconfidence-scores",[],"LbfUnDHNn02sv5rxB_hg7cESQ-a2vgkK05isk_rhYQc",{"bid-tabulation":93,"pdf-to-excel":74,"bid-evaluation":93},3,1786355080591]