Thinking 19 April 2026 6 min read
Why Dune shows its sources
A note on the design decision behind the little citation line, and why we think confidence without evidence is the wrong product.
Every answer Dune gives from your material ends with a line you can click: the file, the page, the row. It is a small piece of interface and it cost us a surprising amount of work. This is a note on why we built it and why we will not take it out.
The failure that matters
The worst thing an assistant can do is be wrong in a way that reads as right. Fluent, well-structured, confident, and untrue. People do not check fluent answers; that is what fluency is for. So the product problem is not "be right more often" — no model is always right — but "make it cheap to check".
A citation makes checking cheap. Two seconds to open the source, one glance to confirm the number. Over a day that is the difference between an assistant you use for the important work and one you use for the rest.
What it changed in the model
Training Dune to cite changed how it answers. A model that must point to a source has less room to improvise, and when it cannot find one it says so — "I could not find this in the files you shared" is now one of the most common things Dune writes, and we count it as a success every time. The rate of unsupported claims fell by more than half in the first month of citation training, before we had improved anything else.
Where it does not apply
General knowledge does not carry a citation; nobody needs a footnote for the boiling point of water. Reasoning does not either — a chain of argument is its own evidence, and Dune shows it in full when you ask. The line appears when a claim rests on something you gave it or something it found on the web, which is exactly where you would want to look.
If you have found a place where the citation was wrong, or missing when it should have been there, tell us. That list is the one we work through first every week.
More updates
- 28 August 2026 Summit, and the longer think Our most capable model reasons for as long as the problem needs. Here is what changed, and when to reach for it.
- 14 July 2026 Dune in your editor A native extension for VS Code and a command-line client. It reads the repository, proposes the change, and runs the tests.
- 2 June 2026 Memory you can see Dune now remembers across conversations — and shows you every single thing it has kept, with a switch beside each one.