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Filter Badge Reference

Every chat turn through Throughline can emit up to three status lines, one recall-summary block, and one outlet badge line. This document is the full legend. For a quick-reference subset see filter/README.md § 5.

Contents

1. Where badges appear

A single user turn produces, at most:

[status 1]   pre-judge short-circuit notice         (optional)
[status 2]   RecallJudge verdict / fallback notice  (optional)
[status 3]   final recall summary                   (always on recall turns)
[recall list]  markdown block of cards              (when cards were injected)
[outlet badge] daemon refine status + cost footer   (always when enabled)

Status lines 1-3 are emitted via OpenWebUI's type: status events. The recall list is a markdown message inserted into the conversation stream (visible and scrollable). The outlet badge is appended to the assistant's reply.

2. Status line 1 — pre-judge interceptions

Shown when the cheap gate or an explicit override decides the turn before the Haiku RecallJudge is consulted.

Badge Meaning Typical trigger
⚡ anchor pass: <token> · zero-cost auto recall Concept-anchor hit User mentions a known vault token (see ANCHOR_TOKENS valve)
🔇 RAG skipped · /native Explicit slash User typed /native …
🔇 RAG skipped · gate=noise_only Cheap noise gate Acknowledgement-only turn (ok, sure, punctuation-only)
🔇 RAG skipped · short-query no-anchor Cheap short gate Very short turn with no personal anchor or capitalised token
🔇 RAG skipped · gate=first_msg_ack First-message ack Opening turn is a pleasantry

When this line fires the RecallJudge is not called and Status 2 is absent.

3. Status line 2 — RecallJudge verdict

Shown when the judge was invoked and returned a usable verdict.

⚡ auto recall: mode=general · 🟢 conf=0.92 · agg · shift · reform→venlafaxine side effects · literal match treated as known entity

Field layout:

Field Meaning When present
mode=general Default recall mode Always
mode=decision User-flagged durable decision (via /decision or strong judge signal) When judge sets it
mode=brainstorm Judge classified as brainstorming; recall suppressed Prefix becomes 🧪 RAG skipped
mode=native Judge says generic question, no vault context needed Prefix becomes 🔇 RAG skipped
🟢 conf=0.XX Confidence ≥ 0.85 Always (when judge returned conf)
🟡 conf=0.XX Confidence 0.60-0.85
🔴 conf=0.XX Confidence < 0.60 (weak verdict — review)
agg aggregate=true; top_k bumped to TOP_K_AGGREGATE Non-default only
shift topic_shift=true; freshness decay baseline reset Non-default only
reform→<rewritten query> Reformulated query sent to the embedder instead of the raw user turn Non-default only
· <reason> Judge's short human-readable justification (≤ ~60 chars) Always

3b. Judge failure fallback

When the judge times out or returns unparsable JSON, status 2 is replaced with a fallback notice:

⚠️ HAIKU_DOWN × 3  consecutive failures  ·  last: url:timeout  ·  RAG falling back to cosine threshold

See §7 below for the ladder.

4. Status line 3 — final recall summary

> 📚 recall: 10 cards · top=0.68 · ⚙️ judge+reform · 💭 mode=general · 🟢 conf=0.92 · reform→venlafaxine side effects · literal match treated as known entity
> 👤 venlafaxine-XR-missed-dose 2026-04-12 🟠 0.78
> 🌐 SSRI-general-mechanism 2026-04-09 🟡 0.54
> ...

Field layout (header line):

Field Meaning
📚 recall: N cards Final N after threshold filtering
· /recall Explicit /recall slash used
· ✍️ /decision /decision slash used; card will be tagged personal_persistent at refine time
· ⚡ aggregate aggregate=true turn; top_k=TOP_K_AGGREGATE (default 20)
top=0.XX Top-1 reranker score
⚙️ <route_path> Who made the routing decision; see §6
⚙️ <route_path>+reform +reform suffix indicates a reformulated query was used
💭 <judge verdict> Same fields as Status line 2, minus the leading emoji, so the audit trail is preserved when Status 2 was suppressed

5. Recall-list entry legend

Each card in the recall block:

> 👤 venlafaxine-XR-missed-dose  2026-04-12  🟠 0.78

Knowledge-identity icon:

Icon knowledge_identity
👤 personal_persistent — durable user fact (medications, hardware, decisions)
🌐 universal — generic reference knowledge
⏳ personal_ephemeral — time-bound (an upcoming flight, a one-off appointment)
🔗 contextual — only meaningful inside a named scenario
📄 fallback — card has no knowledge_identity frontmatter

Freshness dot (appended to the reranker score):

Dot Bonus range Typical age
🔴 ≥ 0.90 < 1 week
🟠 ≥ 0.70 < 1 month
🟡 ≥ 0.50 < 3 months
🟢 ≥ 0.30 < 6 months
⚪ > 0.01 older but non-zero bonus
(none) 0 freshness weighting disabled or date missing

6. route_path taxonomy

The ⚙️ <route_path> field identifies which tier made the decision.

Value Meaning
cheap:short Cheap-gate skipped the turn as too short
cheap:long Cheap-gate passed the turn as long enough to warrant recall without a judge
cheap:first_msg Cheap-gate passed because it is the first message in the conversation
cheap:noise Cheap-gate skipped the turn as noise (ack-only)
cheap:anchor Concept-anchor match forced recall
judge:rag=X \| mode=X \| agg=X \| shift=X Haiku RecallJudge returned a verdict; the individual flags are shown
judge:fail→fallback Judge failed; cosine threshold routed the decision
slash:native /native override
slash:recall /recall override
slash:decision /decision override

A +reform suffix on any judge:* entry indicates that the judge supplied a reformulated query which was used for embedding instead of the raw user turn.

7. HAIKU_DOWN warning ladder

The Filter maintains _judge_fail_streak, reset to 0 on every successful judge verdict.

Streak Behaviour
1 Silent single-turn fallback to cosine. No visible badge.
2 Silent fallback continues. No visible badge.
≥ 3 Inline badge: ⚠️ HAIKU_DOWN × N consecutive failures · last: <err_tag>

<err_tag> is one of url:timeout, url:5xx, parse:json, parse:schema, or key:missing. A single successful verdict clears the counter and the warning disappears on the next turn.

The threshold is three failures because transient OpenRouter blips commonly produce one or two failures per hour; three in a row is strong evidence of a sustained outage (key expiry, quota exhaustion, or upstream incident).

8. Confidence tier colours

Dot Range Interpretation
🟢 ≥ 0.85 Judge is confident. Usually a clean pronoun reference, a well-known entity, or a clear mode signal.
🟡 0.60 - 0.85 Default working range. Majority of turns land here. Not a quality flag.
🔴 < 0.60 Judge is uncertain. Verdict is worth reviewing. A consistent run of 🔴 suggests either degraded context (first message in a new topic) or a prompt that could use anchor tokens.

Confidence colours are rendered on Status line 2 and in the 💭 field of Status line 3.

9. Outlet badge — daemon refinement status

Appended to the assistant's reply when REFINE_STATUS_URL is configured. The Filter polls GET /refine_status?conv_id=<id> and renders:

🛰️ daemon · 🟡 PENDING · i: 1.2k · o: 480 · $0.003

States reported by the /refine_status endpoint:

State Emoji Meaning
SKIP ⏸️ Echo Guard or ephemeral judge skipped this conversation; no cards written.
PENDING 🟡 Daemon has queued the conversation; not yet refined.
DONE 🟢 Cards written and upserted to Qdrant.
BLOCKED 🔴 Echo Guard HIGH tier rejected; duplicate of an existing card.
ERROR ⚠️ Daemon hit an error; entry appended to the Issue Log.
COLD 🧊 Endpoint unreachable — the daemon service is probably not running.
(no badge) — REFINE_STATUS_ENABLED=false or REFINE_STATUS_URL unset.

The badge is a snapshot taken at outlet time. If the daemon finishes refining after the outlet returns, the badge does not update until the next turn. Out-of-band notifiers (desktop notifications, tray indicator) cover the "completed after the fact" case.

The tail of the outlet line reports per-turn cost:

i: 1.2k · o: 480 · $0.003
  • i: — total input tokens across every LLM call initiated by the Filter during this turn (RecallJudge + any L4 agent call).
  • o: — total output tokens (same scope).
  • $X.XXX — priced via a small model-pricing table in the Filter. Not authoritative (it is not driven by OpenRouter's billing API); a fast estimate.

Turns that made no LLM calls (e.g. slash overrides, cheap-gate skips) render i: 0 · o: 0 · $0.000.

11. Suppression rules

Not every turn emits every line. Common exclusions:

  • Slash override turns — Status 1 fires; Status 2 is absent (no judge call); Status 3 is present when recall happened.
  • Concept-anchor hits — Status 1 shows ⚡ anchor pass; Status 2 is absent.
  • Cheap-gate skips — Status 1 shows 🔇 RAG skipped; Status 2 and Status 3 are absent (no recall happened).
  • MODE_JUDGE_ENABLED=false — the RecallJudge is disabled entirely; all turns go through cosine thresholding. Status 2 never appears; Status 3's ⚙️ field reads judge:off.
  • Judge returns needs_rag=false — Status 2 fires with the judge verdict; Status 3 is absent (no recall).

Common questions

Q: "Why did ⚙️ judge appear but 💭 mode=general did not?" A: ⚙️ identifies the decision-maker (judge / slash / cheap gate); 💭 shows the resulting verdict. Both appear on judge:* routes; on non-judge routes the 💭 field is suppressed because there is no verdict to report.

Q: "I keep getting 🔴 conf on my queries. Bad?" A: Not necessarily — a few 🔴 in a row means the judge is consistently uncertain on your content. Common causes: vault vocabulary is specific enough that the judge has no training prior (add tokens to ANCHOR_TOKENS to force-route them as cheap:anchor), or the conversation opened mid-topic with no grounding.

Q: "Can I disable the outlet badge entirely?" A: Yes — set REFINE_STATUS_ENABLED=false and leave REFINE_STATUS_URL empty. The badge disappears; the cost footer also disappears.