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The Hard Rules
The source bytes. This page is generated from
docs/pack/05__THE-HARD-RULES.md, which is served unchanged. Anything rendered on this network stays one click from the file it came from.Thirteen rules that constrain this site. Each has a source and a reason. Rule 0 sits above the others and rules 1 and 13 are the two most likely to be broken.
The rule above the rules
| # | Rule | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | This site publishes the record and never the verdict, about anybody's policy, including the customer's own. The ABP describes what an agent can do, what it was authorised to do and what stands in the way. It never says whether that is acceptable. | Acceptability is not in the document. The same ABP is dangerous in one deployment and harmless in another and nothing about it changed. A policy cannot be dangerous. A deployment can. The verdict belongs to the risk product, where the assets are known and a named professional signs. See the opening of 03__THE-ABP-MODEL.md |
The third party problem, which is this site's real exposure
| # | Rule | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | This site publishes capability claims about nine named commercial products. Every such claim carries a source URL, a retrieval timestamp and a content hash, and no adjective. | The twin discipline requires the first three. The ruling of 20 August requires the fourth: publish the record, never the verdict, with no adjective about a named third party. A sentence saying a named product can read every page you visit, sourced and dated, is a record. The same sentence with dangerously or unnecessarily in it is a verdict about somebody else's product, published by a company selling an assessment of it |
| 2 | Nothing on this site is an assessment, an audit, a certification or a security review of any named product. Say so on every example page. | Already ruled: nothing claims to be a compliance assessment, and it would be dishonest to present it as one. The examples are illustrations of a method, using published configurations, and a reader must not be able to mistake one for a finding about a vendor |
| 3 | State measured against derived, on every page that carries capability rows. | The published map already does it: twenty one of ninety nine measured. A page that hides the ratio is asserting what the map is careful to qualify |
| 4 | Never test a product to find out. No probing, no crafted inputs, no unadvertised requests against anybody's system. | Causing a computer to output data intending unauthorised access is an offence with no damage requirement and no research defence. A row is measured only from a system we are entitled to run, or from the vendor's own published documentation |
Words
| # | Rule | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | Agent, never agentic. | Ruled 10 September on evidence, and restated in 00__START-HERE.md. The site's own name was the thing at risk |
| 6 | Never shorten ABP to the policy. | The word already denotes the insurance instrument on the published licence to operate demonstration |
| 7 | The word insurance does not appear on this site. | Three standing rulings. The ladder puts it at the top rung and forbids calling the lower rungs by it. This site is rung zero. It may link to the demonstration, which carries no price and describes a simulation |
| 8 | Never memory and never zero knowledge in customer facing copy. Use durable, and end to end encrypted. | Ruled 10 September with the evidence in briefs/. The vocabulary is contested and the consumer meaning fights an encryption product |
Claims
| # | Rule | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 9 | Every prohibition rendered anywhere carries the layer it is enforced at. | A prohibition at the first three barrier rows is not a control, and showing one without its barrier manufactures assurance. The estate's own glyph system already carries this |
| 10 | Do not print the sentence that the provider cannot read the data until somebody has answered what leaks. | It is a factual claim about architecture and it is enforceable. A regulator acted on exactly this in November 2020 and the settlement ran twenty years |
| 11 | The regulatory citation is the consumer guidance of 9 March 2026, which says a business should be clear about what tasks an agent is allowed to perform, what data it can access and what constraints apply. Not the European deployer article, which was deferred to 2 December 2027 and reaches only high risk systems. | Citing a duty that does not yet bite, to a buyer whose adviser will check, costs more than it gains |
Licence
| # | Rule | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 12 | Never adapt, translate, quote at length or feed to a model the content of the international management standards. Their titles may be named. The European regulation is expressly reusable for commercial purposes including adaptation, and is the clean source for any mapping. | Prohibited twice over, once as a derivative and once as a model input. A buyer will ask for the management standard and the answer is the regulation |
| 13 | No score, anywhere. No rating, no traffic light, no risk level, no severity ranking, on any page, in any data file, in any visualisation. | Rule 0 made concrete. A score is a verdict. Every buyer will ask for one; the answer is that it lives on the risk product. The one permitted ordering is by reversibility, stated as a property of the action, never as severity |
And one that is about this repository rather than the site
Zero em dashes, zero en dashes, pure ASCII in every document. The style guide's own measurement is that this rule sits at zero per cent compliance across eleven documents. Every file in this pack complies. Add the check to the pipeline as a structural guard and this repository becomes the first one that holds.
This document is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).