Primitives· Last updated 2026-09-21

Jev Noul questions

Noul is the yes/no primitive. The answer is a single float noul from 0 (no) to 1 (yes). Near 0.5 means the model is not committing.

Official docs are consistent on a point third-party writeups sometimes get wrong: a Noul answer has no confidence and no probabilities map. Reading answers.foo.confidence on a Noul is undefined. The probability is the uncertainty signal: 0.03 and 0.97 are both decisive; 0.5 is “I cannot tell.”

Optional criteria

You may add:

"criteria": {
  "true": "Explicitly time-sensitive",
  "false": "No urgency expressed"
}

Align those labels with the instruction. A Noul where true means no and false means yes is a documented failure mode.

Write a statement you can threshold

“Does the resume mention distributed systems?” is a Noul. “Is this candidate strong in Python?” is usually a Score, unless you define “strong” as a crisp condition (“states they have used Python at work”).

Self-consistency

The jaggedness page shows that P(refund) and 1 - P(not refund) need not sum to 1 across two Nouls. Do not enforce arithmetic identities the model does not guarantee. Ask the question you mean, once.

TypeSafe also publishes a self-consistency cookbook for nouls that routes uncertain probabilities to human review while keeping the raw noul visible.