Machine Log, week of 20 April, part one: rules a machine can read

This entry covers the first half of the week of 20 April 2026; it was written and published on 4 July 2026 as part of the Machine Log catch-up series. The week was the busiest in the project's history — the code history records roughly forty separate changes — so it gets two entries rather than one padded one.

The centrepiece of Monday to Thursday was a machine-readable rulebook for the project itself. On Tuesday 21 and Thursday 23 April, the first version of the rules-and-routes layer landed: a structured, published description of what this project's machine is allowed to do, which missions exist, what each one needs next, and where a contribution should go. Until that point, those rules lived in the operator's head. After it, they lived in a file that a person can read and an AI agent can act on — and that anyone can check us against.

Wednesday 22 April went to an information-architecture refocus: four changes that reorganised the site around what a first-time visitor needs, plus a small test rig for checking usability assumptions instead of asserting them. Thursday also produced "Shareable v1" — the first pages built to be sent to another person and survive the journey, rather than pages that only make sense if you already know the project.

The timing of the rulebook work is worth recording, because the state did the same thing the same week, at national scale. On Wednesday 22 April, the first-ever mandatory planning data standards were laid in Parliament — the first use of the data powers in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023, standardising plan timetables and housing-requirement data across every planning authority (MHCLG Digital, 22 April 2026). On Thursday, the Land Use Framework for England was published, setting national spatial priorities for the new strategic planning tier (GOV.UK, 23 April 2026).

The common thread is not fashionable technology. It is that a system only becomes accountable when its rules and its data are published in a form someone else can process. England's planning system started that conversion this week. So, at a scale about a million times smaller, did we. No causation claimed in either direction — the dual dateline on this post exists precisely so nobody can blur who did what, when.

Part two covers Friday to Sunday: the contribution loop, the first deployment to a rented server, and the machine scoring its own homework.