| name | tero-cite |
| description | Get the resolvable citations for a mycelium-tero query — provenance only (anchor + file:line + the cited claim's guarantee tag), without the full item bodies. The provenance-first view of the transparent memory API (DN-87 / E39-1). |
| when_to_use | Use when you want to cite this project's decisions/issues/docs in an answer and need just the resolvable sources (to deep-link or to verify a claim in one hop), not the whole matched rows. |
| allowed-tools | Bash(curl:*), Read |
/tero-cite — Citations for a Query
cite runs the same query as /tero-query but returns citations only — the atomic unit of
provenance. Each citation is { anchor, id, family, kind, file, line, item_tag, guarantee_tag }:
a stable anchor (deep-link/citation key), the file:line to Read, the row's extraction-honesty
item_tag, and — where the source declares one — the cited claim's own
Exact/Proven/Empirical/Declared guarantee. Provenance is mandatory: an uncited query is a
refusal, so cite never returns an empty-but-successful list (DN-87 §6.2).
HTTP
curl -s -H 'Authorization: Bearer demo' 'http://127.0.0.1:8787/v1/cite?kind=id&value=ADR-042'
Envelope: {"kind":"citations","citations":[{ "anchor":…, "file":…, "line":…, "guarantee_tag":… }, …]}.
MCP
tools/call with { "name": "cite", "arguments": { "kind": "id", "value": "ADR-042", "token": "demo" } }. The kind argument selects the query (id/status/kind/cross_ref/text); the
remaining args (value/start/depth) are the same as the query tools.
Honesty
A citation resolves to exactly one Layer-1 row; the two tags are kept distinct (VR-5): item_tag
is how much to trust the row was captured correctly (uniform Empirical/Declared heuristic), while
guarantee_tag is the cited claim's own declared strength (None where the source declares none
— never invented). Source is always ground truth; use the citation to find where to Read.