Outcomes and Confidence

Every intent in TALA has an outcome — what actually happened when the action was executed.

The Outcome Triple

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
struct Outcome {
    status: Status,      // Success, Failure, Partial, Pending
    latency_ns: u64,     // execution time in nanoseconds
    exit_code: i32,      // process exit code
}
}

Outcomes are attached asynchronously. An intent is created when the command is issued; the outcome is recorded when execution completes. This separation is important — it allows TALA to capture the intent even if the command never finishes.

Status

Confidence

Each intent carries a confidence score (f32, 0.0–1.0) representing the system's confidence in its classification and embedding. Factors that affect confidence:

• Command complexity — simple commands like ls have high confidence; ambiguous multi-pipe chains may have lower confidence
• Context richness — commands with clear context (known cwd, established session) score higher
• Embedding quality — commands with close semantic neighbors in the index score higher than novel, unseen patterns

Confidence propagates through the graph. An edge from a high-confidence node carries more weight than one from a low-confidence node.

Why Outcomes Matter

Outcomes close the loop between intent and result. Without them, TALA would capture what you tried to do but not what happened. With outcomes:

• Pattern detection can identify commands that frequently fail in specific contexts
• Adaptive replay can skip steps that are known to succeed in the current state
• Narrative summarization can report success rates across a workflow
• Root-cause analysis can trace backward from a failure to the chain of intents that led to it