Why every node cites a line
The one rule we will not bend: nothing appears on your map unless it came from something you wrote. Here is how we enforce it, and what it cost us.
The first version of Nodemeadow produced beautiful maps. Clusters with confident names, connections with tidy reasons, open questions that sounded wise. About one in eight of those nodes was not in the dump. The model had filled gaps with what a reasonable person might have thought. It was plausible, and it was not yours.
We decided that a thinking tool that quietly adds thoughts is worse than no tool. So every node, connection, tension, and open question now carries the zero-based indices of the fragments it came from, and a validator runs after every model call. A node with no valid source is removed. A connection to a removed node is removed. A fragment nobody cited is parked at the edge of the map as a loose thought, so nothing you wrote can be lost either.
The cost was real. Maps got a little less fluent. Cluster names are plainer. The open-questions node sometimes holds a question you literally typed rather than a sharper paraphrase. We think that trade is correct. When you hover a node and see the exact line it came from, you trust the rest of the map. Trust is the whole product.
The second thing citation gave us was re-mapping. Because every node is anchored to fragments, we can ask the model to keep ids stable where the thought is unchanged, and the map morphs instead of resetting when you add a week of new notes. The animation you see is not decoration. It is the diff.
If you ever find a node you cannot trace to your own words, tell us at care@nodemeadow.com. We treat it as a bug with the highest priority we have.