Guide · 2 min read
Confidence tiers explained: Attested, Declared, Inferred
A record that says a change was written with an AI assistant is only useful if you also know how that was established. Attesta labels every claim with the certainty behind it. There are three tiers, and they are deliberately not blended into a single score.
Attested
An Attested claim comes from a signed event produced by a system that observed the activity directly: a gateway sitting between a developer tool and a model, an agent hook inside a coding agent, or an action running in CI.
The signature matters because it ties the event to a source your organisation configured. Nobody has to remember to disclose anything, and a person cannot quietly change the record afterwards.
- A coding agent's hook reports that a session produced edits on a branch.
- A CI step reports which checks ran on a commit and signs the result.
- A gateway records that a request to a model came from a particular tool.
Declared
A Declared claim is something a person or tool stated, in a form Attesta can read: a commit trailer, a pull request label, or a self-declaration in a form.
Declared provenance is useful and often the most practical starting point, since it needs no agent or proxy. Its limit is that it relies on people being accurate and consistent. It is evidence of what was said, not independent proof of what happened.
- A commit trailer naming the assistant used.
- A pull request label such as "ai-assisted".
- A developer's own note in a disclosure field.
Inferred
An Inferred claim is an estimate produced by a heuristic, for example from the shape of a change or the absence of any declaration. It can be a useful prompt to look closer.
It is always labelled and never counted as proof. Attesta excludes Inferred from coverage figures and from policy decisions about AI use, because a wrong guess presented as a fact is worse than an honest gap.
Why not a single confidence score?
A blended percentage hides the difference between "a signed system reported this" and "someone thinks this is likely". An auditor needs to know which is which, so every event, chart, and export carries its tier, shown with an icon and a text label rather than colour alone.
Moving up the tiers
Most teams start with Declared, through trailers and labels, because it takes minutes. They then add a CI attestation step to turn key facts into Attested events, and route tools through a gateway when one becomes available for the tool in question.
The tiers also make gaps visible. If a repository shows mostly Inferred entries, you know where to start.