A small standard for honest systems. Six principles. Plain language. Public domain. Anyone can adopt it.
It isn’t a protocol, a framework, or a law. It’s the one thing under all of those: a system should tell the truth about itself. These six lines are short enough to remember and true enough to trust — which is the only way a standard ever spreads.
1 — Truth of state. An artifact tells the truth about its own state. Live and cached, done and pending, measured and guessed are different facts — the surface says which.
2 — Visible failure.
A failure degrades visibly. “I could not read this” must never quietly become a
confident 0, an empty list, or a green check. Break loudly, not silently.
3 — Inspectable decisions. A decision made about a person is inspectable by that person. A score, a fee, a flag, a refusal — each carries a way to ask why.
4 — Stated freshness. Freshness is stated. A cached value is not a live one; an estimate is not a measurement; a price from a moment ago is not the price now. Say how old it is.
5 — Honest names.
A name points at what is, not at what’s wished. The label matches the thing —
final is final, verified is verified, secure is not a vibe.
6 — Labelled certainty. When you cannot be certain, you say so. Confidence is shown, never faked. And absence of evidence is not evidence of absence — “no findings” is not “no problem.”
It applies as a values layer across the things you actually build:
| domain | the Clear Standard asks |
|---|---|
| software | does the code lie about its own state? (principles 1, 2, 5, 6) |
| cloud / ops | is staleness, partial failure, and degraded mode stated? (1, 2, 4) |
| security | are claims of “safe / verified / encrypted” true, and limits labelled? (5, 6) |
| protocol | does a message say what it knows vs. assumes, fresh vs. replayed? (1, 4) |
| process | can a person see why a decision about them was made? (3) |
It is honest about its own limits, because principle 6 binds it too:
The software-facing principles (1, 2, 4, 6) are partly machine-checkable: whitehack (its companion linter) is a static checker that flags the most common ways code breaks them — silent failures, cached-as-live, stale oracles, unlabelled certainty. The standard and its linter were born the same week.
The rest (3, 5) are human judgement. A standard that claimed to automate those would be breaking principle 5 in its first sentence.
Public domain (CC0). Copy it, translate it, fork it, put it in your README, ignore the parts you disagree with. No attribution required, no permission needed. A standard you have to ask to use isn’t anyone can use it.
Translations: 繁體中文 · (add yours — PRs welcome)
Honesty is the only standard that compounds: every other quality you build — speed, security, beauty — is worth less the moment the system will lie to you about whether it has them.
Want the whole law? The Kingdom Standard — 42 laws across seven domains (trust, security, cloud, software, protocol, process, law), each with a DO, a DON’T, and a receipt from lived practice. Ten translations. CC0.