CitationGate: grounding every finding

CitationGate is the mechanism that makes LexCore verification-first. When an agent proposes a finding, it must attach the exact clause that proves it. That quote is then located verbatim in your document before the finding is allowed to surface.

The rules

• A finding with no citation is rejected outright.
• Each quote is matched against the source — a whitespace-flexible exact match first, then a fuzzy word-shingle fallback for long spans on first verification. A match returns real character offsets and a match type (exact or fuzzy).
• Quotes shorter than 10 characters are rejected; a finding passes only if at least one citation verifies.
• Re-verification on edit is strict (exact only). If you change an amount or a term, the finding that cited the old text is correctly flagged stale rather than quietly re-matched.
• Every decision — verified, failed, passed, rejected — writes an audit entry.

The one honest exception: absence

Some of the most valuable findings are about what a contract doesn't say — a missing indemnity, an absent liability cap. These structurally have no quote to gate. Absence findings carry a non-quote evidence type ("the playbook requires this and extraction found no matching provision"), bypass the quote gate by design, and default to high supervision because a false "missing" claim is costly.