honest-figures

Note: the crate paths, documents, and measured numbers below are illustrations from the aurora-agent workspace where these methods were developed and tested. The methods themselves apply to any figure or table built from measured data.

Honest figures

A figure is a claim with better production values. Everything the workspace enforces about claims — verifiability, refusal-honesty, negative results as results — applies with more force to figures, because figures are what readers remember and what gets screenshotted out of context.

Every figure carries its source digest

A figure should be reproducible from a retained computation, and should say so on its face:

• Derive figures from digest-bearing artifacts — a certified output's own content hash, a deterministic sweep table (same grid + seed gives byte-identical bytes, asserted by test), a fixture with a pinned digest. Print the digest and the generating command in the caption or the margin.
• Make regeneration a test with the claim in its name — a_sweep_figure_is_byte_stable_for_a_fixed_table — so a figure that drifts from its data fails a build rather than surviving as a stale image.
• The workspace's findings document applies the same rule to tables: every number is asserted by a named test, and where a table is transcribed rather than pinned, the document says which rows are reproduced, not pinned and names the command that reprints the source table. A transcription that does not disclose it is a transcription that cannot be audited.

Refused and absent are drawn as refused and absent, never as zero

The comparison harness's JSON omits the judgement keys entirely on a refused row — absence is semantic — and the scoring plane keeps scored, unscored (with a reason), and inapplicable as three distinct states, where an inapplicable cell "is not a zero and does not lower a fixed-input model's average for an action it was never designed to take" (docs/BIOEVAL_PLANE_AUDIT.md). A renderer is where that discipline usually dies: a chart library coerces a missing value to zero, and a refusal becomes the shortest bar — visually, the cheapest attempt.