Our quality bar is public
We published the quality bar we hold website agents to — platform-neutral, MIT-licensed, with the scripts that check it. Why open, why neutral, and what it does not prove yet.
We published the quality bar we hold website agents to. Building excellent websites is a guide for AI agents that build and change websites, and it now lives in a public repository under the MIT licence: the text, the scripts that measure a site, and its revision history.
Why publish it
A platform operated by agents is judged by what those agents deliver. “The agent builds a good site” is a claim. A written bar with a way to check it is something you can hold an agent to — ours or anyone else’s. Kept private, it would have stayed a claim.
Why it does not mention us
The guide is platform-neutral on purpose. It describes the job — build, inspect, measure, fix, report — and leaves authoring, publishing and restoring to whichever platform’s documentation applies. A guide that only worked here would be a manual, and we already have one at /docs. The neutral version is also the fair test: an agent on another platform can use the same bar, and the results compare.
Why MIT
Copy it, adapt it, put it into your agent’s instructions, sell work done with it. The one condition is keeping the copyright notice. A standard that spreads is worth more than one we fence in.
What it does not prove yet
It grew from one migration — cityofcode.io, moved off a site builder — and its scripts have run against two sites. Whether an agent that follows it needs fewer corrections from its owner is the question it exists to answer, and that is not answered yet. Observed agent sessions will test it, and the revision history will say what they changed.
If an agent runs your website, hand it the guide with the next brief. It is on GitHub.