Provena

Track where every line of AI-generated code came from.

When Claude (or any agent) writes code, Provena records what it saw (files read, pages fetched, your instructions) and what it produced, then lets you ask:

provena_why src/auth.ts:42
→ ← docs/oauth-spec.md [file] via declared (conf 1.00)
     evidence: "access tokens expire after 15 minutes"

Lines with no backing source are flagged ungrounded — model knowledge to verify by hand. That honesty is the point.

📄 Paper: PAPER.md — Hook-Mediated, Span-Level Provenance for Code Written by LLM Agents. Method, benchmarks, and results (0% false attribution across all configs; held-out F1 90.9–94.7%, ceiling 95.7–100%).

How it works

Claude Code session
  Read / WebFetch / Grep ─┐ PostToolUse hook
  your prompts ───────────┤   → captured as `source`
  Write / Edit ───────────┘   → captured as `artifact`
                              ↓
                   .provena/provenance.db  (SQLite)
                              ↑
       provena_* MCP tools (query · cite · audit)

Capture needs no cooperation from the model — hooks sit in the tool path. Storage is local SQLite (Node's built-in node:sqlite), so nothing leaves your machine.

Requirements

• Node ≥ 23.6 (runs TypeScript directly; uses built-in node:sqlite)

Setup

npm install            # installs @modelcontextprotocol/sdk + zod
node src/cli.ts init   # wires hooks into .claude/settings.json + registers MCP in .mcp.json

Then restart Claude Code in this project so it loads the hooks and the provena MCP server.

CLI

command	what it does
provena init	configure Claude Code hooks + register the MCP server
provena status	counts of captured sources / artifact versions / links
provena sources	list captured sources
provena audit <file>	attribute a generated file and print its coverage report
provena gate <file...> [--max-ungrounded <pct>]	CI gate: exit non-zero if a file's ungrounded ratio exceeds the budget
provena export <file> [--out f]	write a signed (ed25519) provenance attestation
provena verify <attestation>	verify a signed attestation is authentic and unaltered
provena reset	wipe the local provenance graph

MCP tools

tool	purpose
provena_status	how much provenance has been captured
provena_sources	list sources the model saw
provena_cite	declare that a line range derives from a source
provena_why	explain where a given line came from

LLM judge (optional)

Embedding attribution decides the confident cases on its own. For the borderline band, an LLM judge reads the candidate sources and decides derivation. Set one key:

export GEMINI_API_KEY=...        # uses gemini-2.0-flash
# or
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=...     # uses claude-haiku-4-5
# optional overrides:
export PROVENA_JUDGE_MODEL=...        # pick a specific model
export PROVENA_JUDGE_PROVIDER=gemini  # force a provider if both keys are set

Without a key, borderline spans are honestly reported as uncertain rather than guessed.

Status

• Phase 0 ✅ attribution-accuracy spike (spike/) — 100% top-1 retrieval, ungrounded cleanly separated
• Phase 1 ✅ capture + store + MCP query
• Phase 2 ✅ embedding attribution engine + LLM judge + audit report + eval harness. Embedding-only F1 94.7%, 0% false-attribution.
• Phase 3 ✅ live judge (gemini-2.5-flash-lite) reaches F1 100% on Benchmark A; multi-language held-out Benchmark B (TS/Python/Go): embedding-only test F1 90.9%, 0% false-attribution, oracle ceiling 95.7%, live 90.9% (eval/RESULTS.md iter 3–4). CI gate (provena gate) shipped. Paper in PAPER.md.
• Next ⬜ larger naturally-occurring corpus, judge-model sweep, signed regulatory export.

Try the evaluation

node src/eval.ts        # labeled benchmark: precision / recall / F1 / false-attribution
node test-judge.ts      # judge wiring unit test (mocked transport)