The byre standards
Codex
Twelve specifications in four volumes. Each is independently implementable, conformance-testable, and free. Together they give AI systems precise language for interfaces, data, logic, and domain.
Substrate
The notation on which all other specifications are written. draft is the only member of this volume — not because it outranks the others, but because everything else depends on it existing first.
Interface
Specifications for the surfaces between humans, agents, and systems. Covers every channel a person can use to interact — visual, auditory, tactile, manual — and the operational contracts that make those surfaces machine-readable.
The sensorimotor layer. Specifies interfaces across every channel simultaneously — visual, auditory, tactile, manual. One source, every modality, no retrofitting. The cognitive-cycle MUST requirement ensures silence is never a valid response.
Operations and states for AI agents. Declares what can be invoked and what can be observed — without the agent ever touching the DOM. The Registry maps IDs to declarations; the Catalog is a navigable forest. Observability is fugue applied to fugue.
The component contract. Declares variants, slots, and the boundary between a component and its host. No auto-registration — the host decides what exists. One test distinguishes variant from theme: is it a CSS custom property?
Design tokens from raw primitive to semantic application. Modes override what a token means. Themes replace the raw layer entirely. Semantic tokens survive both. Breakpoints are not tokenized — the spec is honest about what tokens cannot do.
The runtime composer. Host elements load; mod elements are inert and declarative. Hard dependencies block and are fatal. Soft dependencies order and degrade gracefully. The kernel does exactly one thing: load.
Data & Logic
Specifications for the shapes data takes, the events it generates, and the constraints under which it is valid. The substrate beneath every dynamic system the interface volume builds on.
Structural schemas and shape definitions for data models and type contracts. The vocabulary for describing what data looks like before it moves.
Identity tokens, authentication claims, and capability grants for AI-to-AI and agent-to-service trust relationships.
Event propagation, reactive bindings, and principled side-effect scoping. The spec for how things change in response to other things.
Constraint language and logic expressions for validation across any spec. The shared vocabulary for rules that any specification can reference.
Primitive types, value semantics, and coercion rules. The base layer every other specification inherits when it talks about values.
Domain
Specifications anchored to a particular domain. The first member, cartographer, covers spatial context — where things are, what "near" means, how places relate.