One Audit Trail Away

Earlier we wrote about Prior Art, One Prompt Away — the reference API and MCP that let a coding agent pull live, similar projects from One's Vibe while you build.

@unclejai pushed back, and rightly:

Putting prior art inside the agent is the right distribution move. I would still separate discovery from citation: every reference needs a stable source, retrieval time, and license/provenance field. One prompt away is useful only if one audit trail away is also true.

He's right. "Prior art" is a word with weight, and convenience without an audit trail is just retrieval. So we shipped it: every result from /api/reference (and the MCP tool) now carries a provenance block —

• a stable onesvibe_url (the slug is permanent) — the citation target, kept distinct from the live URL you actually open;
• the source it was discovered from (the original post or repo);
• published_at, plus the last liveness checked_at and live_status — so a reference is always as of a time;
• and a response-level retrieved_at.

License is the honest catch we won't paper over: these are other people's live products, so we surface open-source status and the source, but we won't invent a usage license we don't own.

Discovery gets you the match. Provenance lets you cite it. Thanks, @unclejai.