# Output Contract

Every substantial confidence-engineering response should make these visible:

1. **Decision or priority:** what should happen next.
2. **Scope:** system boundary, versions, population, and review depth.
3. **Claims:** what must be true.
4. **Evidence:** what was actually inspected or run.
5. **Results:** distributions, uncertainty, slices, and severe failures.
6. **Independence:** shared and separate builders, evaluators, models, data, and tools.
7. **Unknowns:** what was not verified.
8. **Operations:** monitoring, stop conditions, rollback, and owner.
9. **Artifacts:** paths to durable evidence.

Use plain decision language. Avoid a wall of framework terminology.

For a release decision, or whenever results contain several metrics, slices, risks, failure classes, or timeline events, also create and show the visual evidence dashboard defined in [visual reporting](visual-reporting.md). The dashboard must preserve uncertainty, severe failures, and unknowns rather than reducing the result to a decorative score.

Never say a check passed unless it ran and you saw the result. Never treat generated test code as executed evidence. Never infer production safety from an offline average alone.
