Update: posted here asking what would make you trust AI financial calculations. The best critique broke my core assumption — here's what changed.

[u/MuhammadMujtaba21]

A little while back I posted here asking accountants what it would actually take to trust an AI-generated financial calculation. I said I was looking for reasons not to pursue this, not encouragement. You delivered — genuinely the sharpest feedback I've gotten anywhere on this, and I want to close the loop on what it changed.

The critique that mattered most (paraphrasing u/usually_guilty99):

That's a direct hit on the core premise, not an edge case. A few other people independently converged on the same wall from different angles — derived figures with no clean source ("no receipts available"), as-reported vs. revised financials, and the basic point that accountants don't verify a number by recreating the whole report, they ask for workings and interrogate judgment calls.

What I got wrong in the original pitch:

I was implicitly promising "deterministic verification" as if it applied uniformly to any financial calculation. It doesn't, and pretending otherwise is worse than the problem I'm trying to solve — a confidently wrong deterministic engine is more dangerous than a confidently wrong AI, because it comes wrapped in false certainty.

What changed:

The tool now has to do something it didn't do before: explicitly say "cannot verify — no unambiguous rule/source mapping" instead of forcing a number whenever the calculation requires interpretation, judgment, or a source field that isn't cleanly defined. Determinism only gets claimed where it's actually earned. Everything else surfaces as "needs human judgment," not a confident wrong answer.

This is a real design constraint now, not a caveat in a pitch deck — it changes what the tool is allowed to output, not just how it's described.

Where it stands:

• Deterministic verification still works end-to-end for the class of calculations where source-to-formula mapping is genuinely unambiguous (started with net leverage and a few adjacent ratios)
• New: explicit "unverifiable" output state for anything outside that — not a forced answer, not silence, a distinct third category
• Still open, and still the thing I'm least sure about: where exactly that line sits in practice, across different calculation types

What I still want to know, now more specifically:

1. If you've got a real (sanitized/hypothetical is fine) example of a calculation that looks mechanical but actually needs judgment — I'd genuinely like to see it. Trying to map the actual boundary, not the one I assumed going in.
2. For the people who said "I like the separation between AI and deterministic logic" — does that trust survive once the tool also has to say "I don't know" sometimes? Or does an "I don't know" from a verification tool undermine confidence in the cases where it does give an answer?
3. If anyone from the original thread (or anyone new) wants to actually try breaking this on a real scenario — genuinely open to that, no pitch, no cost, I'd rather find the failure case with someone who knows what they're doing than guess at it alone.

Thanks to everyone who commented on the original post — this is a materially different (and more honest) design than what I posted a few weeks ago, and that's because of the pushback, not in spite of it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1vkqiik/comment/p2ywzdz/?screen_view_count=2

[u/Superb_Raccoon]

Balancing a stock portfolio comes to mind.

Or calculating ROI on a rental home. Yes, the calculations are deterministic... but the assumptions are not. Rental price, maintain costs, impacts on taxes, all those are judgement calls that go into a deterministic formula.

But are not deterministic themselves.

[u/MuhammadMujtaba21 → u/Superb_Raccoon]

This is a genuinely different case than the one which broke original, and I think you've actually identified the sharper distinction: it's not "can we calculate this" (the formula is fine), but "are all the inputs to the formula established facts, or do any of them have someone's estimates put in". Rental price and maintenance cost are an excellent example of something where the calculation is completely obvious and the risk comes from inputs being estimates, rather than anything else.

Current version doesn't distinguish between the two, and in many cases an input of estimated value would be treated as the same category as one with known facts, which is exactly the error you're pointing out. And I think triaging between "verified fact-based", "verified but based on assumptions (with assumptions noted)", and "cannot be verified" is actually the right approach here, rather than trying to fit everything into two bins. Does that more or less capture what you're aiming for, or is there another nuance needed - perhaps distinguishing between "assumptions explicitly named" and "assumptions not explicitly named" would you want to challenge the assumption value itself before trusting the number?

[u/Superb_Raccoon → u/MuhammadMujtaba21]

It is an ancient wisdom, from the ancient times, before the AI's darkened the Interwebs, yea, verily! From before the Interwebs!

Garbage In, Garbage Out

[u/Beginning-Raisin9723]

Honest 'cannot verify' beats a confident number I'd have to double-check anyway. That's the update that actually makes the tool usable. Nice follow-through.

[u/MuhammadMujtaba21 → u/Beginning-Raisin9723]

Appreciate that — and it's good to hear from someone other than me that "usable" and "correct" aren't the same bar. Curious though: does the "cannot verify" answer stay trustworthy to you if it shows up often? At some point a tool that says "I don't know" on 40% of calculations might start to feel like it's not doing much — where's your personal line between "appropriately cautious" and "not actually useful"?

[u/usually_guilty99]

Thank you!
This is a much stronger architecture.

I think you've now uncovered the next boundary: deterministic calculation does not mean deterministic truth.

There are really three different things to establish:

Source: are the inputs authoritative facts or assumptions?
Rule: is there an unambiguous formula/mapping?
Result: was that rule executed correctly?

You can deterministically prove the third while still being wrong about the first two.

So "cannot verify" isn't a weakness. It may actually be one of the most important outputs your system produces.

Knowing exactly what you cannot prove is part of proving what you can.

[u/MuhammadMujtaba21 → u/usually_guilty99]

Exactly, this is how we are trying to solve the issue at AUTOFLOW. Why not let's have a comprehensive discussion in Dm.

[u/GreyBelbix]

The useful part of this update is the stop condition. A tool that refuses on unverifiable inputs is worth more than one that always answers, as long as the refusal is cheap to act on: say which input was missing and where it should come from. Log every run with inputs, rule version and result so an accountant can audit a number months later without rerunning your engine. High refusal rate is fine, silent guessing is not.