Reports

A report is the part of the work meant to travel. It turns the evidence from an experiment into something a reader can inspect, discuss, and use without replaying the entire run.

Depending on the question, the most useful report might be a short research narrative, a diagram, a comparison table, a plot, or an interactive explorer. The format is secondary. A good report makes the claim, supporting evidence, limits, and next decision clear.

A report is not just the final screen

An experiment can generate many files, logs, checkpoints, and intermediate analyses. Those remain part of its working record. A report selects and organizes the pieces that matter to a reader.

That distinction is useful when a run produces a technically correct output that is still hard to interpret. You can improve the report's explanation or presentation without pretending the underlying evidence changed. If the claim itself needs new evidence, return to the thread and launch a follow-up experiment.

Evidence and provenance

A report brings the evidence into a useful story, but it does not replace the experiment record. Follow its references into Plan, Timeline, Code, Compute, or Metrics when the decision depends on exactly how the result was produced.

For example, a report may say that an intervention reduced hallucinations. Before building on it, you may still need to confirm which checkpoint was tested, whether evaluation was held out, how the metric was defined, and whether the control moved too. Some supporting data, checkpoints, logs, and working files may remain in the experiment even when they are not shown in the report.

Where reports appear

• Reports is an experiment's durable output view.
• Thread Summary shows recent reports.
• Thread Timeline preserves every report in chronological context.
• Shared Reports lists reports you created or that others shared with you.

These are different windows onto the same output, not copies with separate meanings.

Working copy and saved versions

A report can keep changing while you review the evidence, improve the explanation, or ask Silico for a clearer presentation. This is the working copy: the current version inside your research environment.

When you make a report available to anyone with the link, Silico publishes a saved version to a public page. Later edits remain in the working copy until you choose Update, so a public reader never sees a half-finished revision. The share menu tells you when the public page is behind the current report.

Version history lets you return to an earlier saved state when a revision moves in the wrong direction. Restoring a version makes it current again. Organization and public views then follow that restored state according to their sharing mode.

Taking a public report down stops its link from working. Exporting a report as PDF, HTML, or source does not change who can open it.

Read a report critically

Begin with four questions:

1. What did the work claim or produce?
2. Which evidence carries most of that claim?
3. What would make the conclusion fail to generalize?
4. What decision should change because of it?

A null result can be valuable when the evaluation was sensitive enough to detect the effect. A polished result can still be weak when it hides a tiny sample, an inappropriate split, or a changed checkpoint. The report should help you find those boundaries rather than reward confidence for its own sake.

Reuse a report without losing its assumptions

Copy the report link when someone mainly needs the output. Share the thread when they also need the reasoning, decisions, and history behind it.

To build on a result, attach the report to a thread and explain the new question. Call out any changed model, data, checkpoint, split, metric, or transformation so the follow-up does not quietly inherit the wrong assumptions.

For a teammate, a useful handoff might read:

Use this report as evidence for the baseline behavior, but rerun the intervention on the newer checkpoint and keep the same held-out split so we can compare the effect directly.

Continue with Review and share reports or Shared Reports.