How Determina works

The world around the system

A recommendation, search result, or agent action depends on more than the model. Users, source freshness, tool responses, authorization, and earlier actions change what happens next.

Determina makes those surrounding conditions explicit. A behavior trial runs a system version against a configured environment and records the resulting trajectory. A comparison can then examine a candidate against a baseline under the same declared conditions.

Conditions, behavior, evidence

Configure conditions. Describe the task, users or cohorts, available sources and tools, and relevant state. Keep the configuration and seed with the run so the setup can be inspected later. See Systems and Versions and Source Specs.

Observe behavior. Record the inputs, outputs, tool calls, and state changes that occur during the trial. The useful result is the path the system took, alongside the conditions that produced it. See Behavior Trials.

Inspect evidence. Review findings together with traces and manifests. Compare a candidate with a baseline before making a release decision. See Results Packets and Compare and Launch Decisions.

What a trial can tell you

A finding can expose a failure under the tested conditions. A passing trial says those particular checks did not find a failure; it does not establish universal safety or predict every real user interaction.

Seeds and saved inputs make runs traceable. External model providers and changing services may still introduce variation. Inspect the run manifest and integration boundary before treating two runs as equivalent.

Choose the right path

Recommenders focus on rankings and cohorts. Agents focus on actions, tools, and resource changes. Search describes the search integration and evidence model; the hosted search product remains in development.

Start with the local smoke test for package and integration checks. Use the hosted quickstart when you have platform access. Contact founders@determina.dev for access or an integration example.