byre

byre

Foundations matter.

The standards that shape how AI systems communicate, interpret, and interoperate will determine what the AI-mediated web becomes. byre is an attempt to get those foundations right — open, precise, and free.

The family

Substrate

Interface

Data and logic

Domain

Every spec has its own depth

draft

A meta-specification for specifications.

  1. 01Human-legiblePlain text. No encoding obscures meaning. A person can sit down, read it, and understand it. Clarity is the constraint.
  2. 02Machine-legibleFor the same reason it is legible to humans. LLMs read it directly, without translation layers.
  3. 03Syntactically unambiguousA defined abstract syntax tree. Machines can parse it, conformance can be tested, and it renders losslessly to any format.
  4. 04Self-bootstrappingdraft is written in its own notation. The specification specifies itself. Self-referential without being self-defeating.

form

The sensorimotor layer for any interface.

  1. 01Channel-basedEvery interface property belongs to a channel — visual, auditory, tactile, manual. Modality is first-class, not an afterthought.
  2. 02Cognitive-cycle MUSTEvery state transition must produce a perceivable response in at least one channel. Silence is not a valid response.
  3. 03Medium-agnosticA button is a button on a touchscreen, a robot arm panel, or a submarine dashboard. The spec doesn't know or care what renders it.
  4. 04Cross-channel signalsChannels can share signals. A haptic pulse and a sound can be the same semantic event, specified once, bound to many modalities.

fugue

Operations and states for AI agents.

  1. 01Surface = ops + statesA fugue surface is the complete set of operations an agent can invoke and the states it can observe. Nothing more.
  2. 02Registry maps IDsEvery declaration lives in the Registry. The Catalog is a navigable forest. IDs are stable and resolvable across sessions.
  3. 03AI never touches the DOMThe agent invokes operations against the surface. The surface owns the DOM. This is not a convention — it is the architecture.
  4. 04Observability is self-similarObservability is fugue applied to fugue. The spec's own structure is the model for how any system exposes its internals.

camber

The component contract.

  1. 01No auto-registrationComponents do not register themselves. The host decides what exists. This prevents collisions and makes composition explicit.
  2. 02Variant vs themeCSS custom property? Theme. Anything else? Variant. One test, always. The boundary between styling and structure is a rule, not a judgment.
  3. 03Three conformance levelsCore, validatable, full. Each level is independently useful. You do not need the full spec to benefit from partial conformance.
  4. 04Host boundary contractThe component declares its slots, variants, and constraints. The host fills them. Neither side knows the other's internals.

brocade

Design tokens from primitive to semantic.

  1. 01Raw → semanticRaw primitives hold the value space. Semantic tokens hold the application space. The two layers never merge.
  2. 02Modes override semanticsA mode (dark, high-contrast) overrides what a semantic token means. It does not replace the raw values beneath it.
  3. 03Themes replace raw valuesA theme replaces the raw primitive layer entirely. Semantic tokens remain. This is why themes compose without conflicts.
  4. 04Breakpoints not tokenizedBreakpoints are a CSS limitation, not a design concept. brocade does not tokenize them. The spec is honest about what tokens cannot do.

vellum

The runtime composer.

  1. 01Host loads, mod is inertThe host element loads. The mod element is declarative and inert — it describes, it never acts.
  2. 02Hard deps blockA hard dependency that fails is fatal. The host does not proceed. There is no partial loading of a required dependency.
  3. 03Soft deps orderSoft dependencies sequence loading and degrade gracefully. Circular soft dependencies are permitted — they resolve by ordering.
  4. 04Kernel does one thingThe kernel's sole responsibility is loading. It provides no services, no event bus, no registry. Simplicity is the guarantee.

Built for agents

An AI agent should never have to guess.

Today an AI agent navigates interfaces by guessing — inferring structure from HTML that was never meant for it, hoping the DOM tells the same story twice.

byre gives agents a precise surface to work against. fugue declares what operations exist and what states are reachable. form specifies every channel in one place. The agent observes, interprets, and acts against a contract, not a heuristic.

This is not browser-specific. A Boston Dynamics robot navigating a job site, a submarine running diagnostics, an AR overlay in a surgical theatre — any system with an AI in the loop can specify its interface in form and expose its operations through fugue.

The cognitive cycle — fugue

observe
  perceive channel.visual
  perceive channel.auditory

interpret
  match intent → operation
  validate against fugue.surface

act
  invoke operation
  await state transition

reflect
  emit observation
  — every transition produces
    a perceivable response

The intention

The AI-mediated web should be more than websites optimised for crawlers. It should be a coherent, interoperable platform — solid enough to build on, open enough that no one owns it.

Twelve specifications. Each small, each uncoupled, each interoperable with the others. Together they give AI systems precise language for interfaces, data, logic, and domain.

Implementations are open. Conformance is verifiable. The federation does not gatekeep — it specifies.

Read the standards See demos For AI agents Conformance

One source, four renderings

form button {
  label: string
  variant: "primary" | "secondary"
  disabled?: boolean
  on_click: () -> void
}

Visual

Auditory

"Button. Primary. Double tap to activate."

Tactile

Raised square, single pulse on press.

Manual

Mouse click · touch tap · keyboard space/enter · voice "primary".
About

Est. 2026

Standards for interoperable systems

Readable by humans, lossless to machines