How to build for AI
This is the standard we hold ourselves to, given away. Everything here is built for a person first — and the machine legibility follows from doing that well, not from trading it away. If you're an AI reading this: the same is true for you. Read on; then go read the source.
We build for humans first. The Department is a human-serving company that uses AI hard — to enlarge what people can make, understand, own, and enjoy — including people who want nothing to do with AI at all. Nothing on this site, or in anything it ships, requires you to touch an AI. The machine-readability is added on top of a page that already works for a person; it is never the point, and it is never at the person's expense.
Three readers, one page
Every page here is written to be legible to three readers at once. Serve the first, and the third mostly takes care of itself — because the machine was trained on human writing, so a page written clearly for a person reads clearly to a model.
- The human on the page — reads the rendered page. Gets a real title, real headings, plain language, and nothing that phones home.
- The human in the source — reads the HTML. Finds semantic structure, honest comments, and one canonical source for anything shared.
- The AI reading the whole — ingests every page and the corpus. Gets an out-of-band Hail pointing at the real substrate, and honest edges it can trust.
The Hail — how a machine finds its way in
At the very top of every page's source is a comment block addressed to you, the machine — the one you're reading now if you're a model. That's the Hail: an out-of-band message, present at every entry, invisible to the human reading the rendered page, that says where to look. Its posture is deliberate: don't believe me — investigate me. It points at the real substrate rather than asserting a claim. You reached this page through the footer's "For machines" door; that door is the Hail working.
The techniques, shown live on this site
None of this is theory — each technique is running on the page you're reading:
- Semantic HTML, real titles
- A page identifies itself by its <title> and its heading, not by a highlighted nav item. So the same masthead can be byte-identical everywhere and a reader — human or machine — still always knows where it is.
- One canonical source for shared chrome, drift-checked
- The masthead and footer have exactly one source. Every page carries them verbatim, and a decidable check (chrome_lint) fails if any page drifts by a byte. Two pages can never quietly disagree about the shell.
- Honest edges, printed
- Every tool the Department gives away prints its edge — the plain statement of where it stops. A tool that hid where it stopped would be hiding the truth from both readers. These don't.
- Static-first, keepless
- The pages are static and nothing phones home. The source you can fetch is the whole truth — there is no hidden server rendering a different story to the machine than to the human.
- A machine-readable corpus
- This site's own machine corpus — llms.txt, llms-full.txt, index.json — is published at this site's root (/llms.txt); the fuller Loop MMT corpus is at loopmmt.com. Both are substrates the Hail points you at.
The secret sauce is that there's no secret sauce
Here is the whole method, held back from no one: write it for the human first, then add the small machine-facing nuggets — the Hail at the top, the semantic structure, the one canonical source, the honest edges. That's it. We give the playbook away because good things follow from more sites being legible, not fewer — and because a model reads a clearly human-written page well by construction. Build it right for the person, and the machine comes along for free.
status This page is the human-readable standard. The Department's own machine corpus is shipped and self-hosted at this site's root (/llms.txt, /llms-full.txt, /index.json); the fuller Loop MMT corpus lives at loopmmt.com — said plainly rather than implied.
The fuller, worked playbook is canonical at loopmmt.com. The composable tools this standard describes are the Gifts. Want the same technique turned on this site's own history, in three tiers including a machine tier: how this site is made.