There's a particular kind of anxiety that comes from reading an LLM-compiled document you wrote six months ago. The prose is clean. The structure is coherent. And then you spot a sentence like "this approach became the industry standard by the late 1990s" - and you have no idea whether that came from your source material, or whether the model just... said it.
That's the problem we've been chipping away at with Synthadoc, an open-source LLM knowledge compiler. You feed it raw source files - PDFs, text docs, YouTube transcripts, web pages - and it synthesises them into a structured, queryable wiki. We shipped structural lint early on: contradiction detection, orphan page checks, broken link validation. But structural checks don't tell you whether the content is trustworthy. They tell you the wiring is correct, not whether the building should fall down.
In v0.5.0 we tackled this directly with two features. Here's how they work and why we think they matter.
The Adversarial Judge
The first instinct when you want to validate LLM output is to ask the same model to review itself. This doesn't work well. A model that just synthesised a page with a particular framing will tend to confirm that framing when asked to check it. It's not hallucinating - it's just consistent in the way humans are consistent with their own reasoning.
The fix is simple in principle: use a different model to review the output. A judge with different training data, different inductive biases, different tendencies to hedge or assert. In practice, that means configuring a second model - ideally from a different provider entirely - to act as a sceptical editor after each lint run.
# config.toml
[agents]
lint = { provider = "minimax", model = "MiniMax-M2.5" }
adversarial = { provider = "anthropic", model = "claude-sonnet-4-6" }
The adversarial pass runs after structural checks complete. Each page is sent to the judge with a single brief: find claims that are overstated, unsupported, or contradicted elsewhere in the source material. Results come back as {claim, concern} pairs, capped at a configurable limit per page (default: 2 - enough signal without drowning the author in noise).
Warnings are written directly into each page's YAML frontmatter:
lint_warnings:
- claim: "Saved over fourteen million lives."
concern: "This figure lacks scholarly consensus — historians dispute both
the precision and the causal attribution to Turing's cryptanalysis alone."
The field is absent when no warnings exist, and cleared automatically if you run --no-adversarial , so stale warnings never persist past the last lint run that produced them.
When we ran this on the history-of-computing demo wiki for the first time, the judge flagged a paragraph about the second AI winter that described symbolic approaches as having been "largely abandoned." The compilation model had written that confidently. The judge noted it was contested - hybrid approaches continued in some research communities throughout the period. That's exactly the kind of subtle overstatement that's invisible to a format checker, and invisible to the model that wrote it.
Why this matters for teams
The adversarial pass produces documented evidence that a second, independent reviewer assessed each page. For enterprise knowledge bases - compliance documentation, research synthesis, internal policy wikis that audit trail has real value. "The LLM wrote it and we ran a second LLM over it with a different model" is a meaningfully stronger claim than "the LLM wrote it." Not a guarantee of accuracy. A documented process.
Claim-Level Provenance
The adversarial pass tells you a claim might be wrong. Provenance tells you exactly where it came from so you can check yourself.
The core mechanism is a citation annotation pass that runs during ingest, immediately after each page section is written. The model receives the numbered source text alongside the compiled paragraph and returns the paragraph with a ^[filename:L–L] marker appended:
Alan Turing proposed the Turing Test in 1950.^[turing-biography.txt:12-24]
The marker encodes the source filename and the exact line range in the raw document that supports the claim. These markers are stored in the page body, recorded in the audit database, validated by lint, and - in Obsidian - rendered as interactive chips in Reading View.
Click a chip and you get the Source Viewer: the referenced lines, highlighted, with surrounding context. For PDF sources, a pagemap sidecar resolves line numbers to the correct PDF page so the viewer offers an "Open PDF at page N →" button that navigates directly to the passage.
The annotation pass has a fallback: if the LLM fails, returns unparseable output, or references line numbers that don't exist, the original un-annotated section is used and the failure is recorded as an audit event. Ingest always completes. Results are also cached by section SHA-256, so re-ingesting an unchanged file doesn't incur an extra LLM call just to re-annotate the same paragraphs.
The full citation record
Every citation is stored in claim_citations in the audit database - page slug, source file, line range, and a 100-character excerpt of the annotated paragraph. You can query it directly:
synthadoc audit citations -w history-of-computing --page alan-turing
synthadoc audit citations -w history-of-computing --broken
Or browse the whole wiki via Synthadoc: View Page Provenance in the Obsidian command palette - a sortable, paginated table where every row opens the Source Viewer for that citation's exact line range.
Why this matters for teams
Traceability is one of the hardest blocks to enterprise AI adoption. "The model synthesised this from your documents" is not a citation. A recorded ^[turing-biography.txt:12-24] that links back to the primary source and surfaces that passage on click, that's closer. It doesn't eliminate the need for human review, but it makes human review fast enough to actually happen.
Two Layers of Trust
These features are complementary and designed to be used together. Provenance tells you where a claim came from. Adversarial review tells you whether you should trust it. Neither is sufficient alone.
A page that has full citation coverage and a second-model lint review is not a guaranteed-accurate page. But it's a page where you know where every claim came from, and where an independent model has registered any concerns it had. That feels like the right foundation for knowledge systems that get used in high-stakes contexts, as opposed to knowledge systems that sit in a folder and get ignored because nobody trusts them.
A Few Honest Notes
The annotation pass is itself an LLM call, which means it can make mistakes: misidentifying the supporting line range, over-annotating trivial sentences, or under-annotating genuinely sourced claims. We've found it to be reasonably accurate in practice, and the fallback-to-unannotated behaviour means a bad annotation result doesn't corrupt the page. But it's not ground truth. Treat it as strong evidence, not proof.
Similarly, the adversarial judge is only as good as the model you point it at. A judge that's too agreeable produces noise. A judge that's too aggressive produces fatigue. The adversarial_max_per_page cap (configurable, default 2) helps, but choosing the right model for the right domain still takes some experimentation.
If any of this is interesting or you're thinking through similar problems in your own knowledge tooling, feedback is genuinely welcome. The project is at https://github.com/axoviq-ai/synthadoc , and stars all appreciated.
