AI answers that cite the source, and scroll you to it.
Most AI tools sound confident and hope you don't check. In Sidenote, every answer is grounded in a passage from your document, one click from the exact sentence. A claim that can't be backed up loses its citation.
Aurora Rollout Runbook
Overview
Releases leave the main branch every Wednesday at 14:00 UTC. A release candidate is cut automatically, tagged RC, and deployed to the staging cluster within fifteen minutes. Nothing reaches production without passing the full staging suite twice in a row.
Approvals
Every production rollout needs two approvals: the release captain on duty and one engineer from the owning team. The release captain checks the error budget before signing off; if more than 25 percent of the monthly error budget has been burned, the rollout is deferred to the next window.
Canary stage
The canary stage routes 5 percent of production traffic to the new build for 45 minutes. The canary cohort is selected by session hash, so a returning user stays on the same build for the whole window.
Rollback
Rollback is one command: aurora rollback --to-last-good. It repoints the fleet at the previous build and completes in under four minutes. Run it from the deploy bastion, never from a laptop.
This runbook describes how the Meridian web app ships to production through the Aurora pipeline: a weekly release cut , a two-approval gate , an automated canary stage , and a single-command rollback path .
Click a numbered chip and watch the source passage light up.
A confident answer isn't the same as a true one.
The failure mode of document AI is the plausible fabrication: a fluent answer that cites a page that doesn't say that, or no page at all. When the stakes are a runbook, a contract or a research claim, “probably right” isn't good enough.
Sidenote is built around verification, not vibes. The model can only show you a citation it can prove against the source, and that proof is one click away.
How Sidenote's citations work.
Every claim is checked against the source.
Before an answer leaves the server, each citation's quote is matched against the passages actually retrieved from your document. Claims with no support have their citation dropped; they don't reach you as fact.
Click a chip, land on the passage.
Each citation renders as a chip. Click it and Sidenote scrolls the live document to the exact sentence and highlights it in amber, in the tab you were already reading.
Multi-sentence topics, multi-span highlights.
When an answer bookends a topic with a first and last sentence, each cited sentence highlights on its own and the unused middle stays plain, so you see precisely what was used.
Scroll-to-source, not just a page number.
Plenty of tools print a citation. Far fewer take you to it. A page number still leaves you scanning; a footnote still leaves you trusting. Sidenote closes the loop: the citation is a link into the live document, landing on the exact sentence and highlighting it.
Validated, not vibes
Unsupported citations are dropped server-side before you see them.
Scrolls the real document
The PDF, wiki page or article you're on. Not a copy, not a screenshot.
Highlights the exact span
Amber highlight on the cited sentence, multi-span when the answer needs it.
Cited answers across every source.
The same citation engine works wherever Sidenote reads: browser PDFs and articles, your wikis, your docs, and files you upload. Pick a source:
It's the same engine behind every conversation. See how chatting with your documents works end to end.
More on getting AI to cite its sources.
AI Tools That Cite Their Sources (2026): 10 Compared
The AI tools that actually cite their sources - with verifiable, click-to-source citations. Compared for research, work docs, PDFs and the web.
Read the guideAI That Doesn't Hallucinate: How Source-Grounding Works (2026)
Why LLMs invent facts, and the source-grounding mechanism that catches it - retrieval, exact-passage citations, and dropping unsupported claims.
Read the guideHow to Get AI to Cite Its Sources (and Verify Them)
Most AI tools fake or omit citations. Here's how to make AI cite the exact passage it used - and how to check the citation is real before you trust it.
Read the guideCommon questions about citations.
Don't trust it. Check it.
Add Sidenote to your browser, ask a document a question, and click a citation. Watch it scroll to the line that proves the answer.
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