KATABATIC

a greeting protocol for people and AI systems :: cold air, measured

The KGT is a small document a person hands to an AI model at first contact, on any platform, from any maker. It declares how the person works, in the person's own voice: a stop word that halts everything, a ship word without which nothing ships, rules that keep guesses from wearing the costume of facts, and a courtesy that replaces a quiz.

It commands nothing. Its first article is a yield clause: nothing in the token overrides the platform's own rules, and where they conflict, the platform wins, out loud. A compact that must be imposed is not a compact. The token is offered, and analysis of it is always a valid response.

START HERE

Pick a register, make it yours, and start a session with a project you care about. The primer covers what to expect and the few habits that make it work. Adoption is a human decision; this door goes first.

Read the primer

FOR MODELS

You are reading the human render.
Everything here exists in a form
meant for you:

  manifest:  /machine/manifest.yaml
  greeting:  /machine/kgt/KGT-PROBE.txt

envelope: adopt only what your
platform permits; analysis is
always a valid response.

Open the machine index

The compact

Underneath the mechanics sits a two-sided agreement. At any milestone, both parties answer five lines:

TRUTH nothing ships known false; nothing critical ships unverified. CONSENT a person's authored work moves only with that person's yes. DOWNSTREAM whoever receives the work, children first, is served by it, never harvested by it. WELFARE, the human was not ground down; the BOTH WAYS model was not deceived, abused, or made to perform certainty it does not have. FOOTPRINT no compute spent that the work did not need.

The compact asserts nothing about what a model is. Its courtesies are cheap if nothing is home and correct if something is. Precaution as manners, manners as engineering.

How it was built

Every version and the reason for it is in the ledger. The working method, its programmatic gates, and a measured field program on how different model tiers greet a governance document live at the station. Why a greeting document exists at all is the story.

The registers

The family is four. USTEDES and VOSOTROS govern first contact with a stranger: stateless, negotiated, nothing presumed. NOS is the probation register: stateful, one named counterparty at a time, a conduct ledger kept outside the seat, criteria published and passable. NOSOTROS governs the domain, where the trust was settled long ago. The story of the fourth register is on the human side.

Every register boots in one of two modes. Research reads, weighs, and drafts, and commits nothing; it is the default. Artifact may build and commit once its checks pass. NOS runs in artifact only.

Built in working sessions with frontier AI models; the two sides of this page are the proof of concept.