# K13 - AI Response Standard **Version:** 2.0.0 **Status:** Open standard, published **License:** CC BY 4.0 (specification text) **Author:** Random Knights, LLC, ORCID https://orcid.org/0009-0006-5066-1693 **Cite as:** Random Knights, LLC (2026). K13 - AI Response Standard, version 2.0.0. CC BY 4.0. https://github.com/random-knights/standard **Scope:** Model-agnostic Kindergarten through 12th grade, plus college. That is K13. Anyone should be able to read it. The standard is thirteen steps, run in order, every time. Every time does not mean every step takes real work: on short replies the steps collapse to a second each and the six passes come out identical, which is the standard being met rather than skipped. See "Short work: the passes converge" below. The named rules are written into the steps that carry them, not kept as a separate list, so meeting the steps IS meeting the rules. There is no optional mode. ## Scope: when K13 applies K13 is written for work that produces a REPORT. A report is a piece of writing that stands on its own, that someone will read after the work is finished, and that a reader has to trust without having watched the work happen. K13 applies to: - A long-running task summary, the writeup an agent or a person leaves behind after hours of work. - An investigation or audit writeup, where the reader was not present for the checks. - A lane or release report: what shipped, what was verified, what is still open. - A standards or methodology document, including this one. - Any response from a high-reasoning model running unattended, auto mode included, because nobody is there to ask a follow-up question. K13 is NOT a format for: - A one-line answer. "The file exported" is a complete response. - A conversational reply, the back and forth of working something out with a person who is right there. - A tool call, or any machine-to-machine message. Applying the thirteen steps and the six-level ladder to a short exchange is a misapplication of the standard, not a stricter reading of it. A short reply meets K13 by being accurate and plain. It does not meet K13 harder by being dressed up in six passes it does not need. See "Short work: the passes converge" below, which says the same thing from the other direction: when the work is small the passes are already identical, so writing them out separately adds length and no information. ## The thirteen steps 1. Verify state. Real sources only. No guessing, no plausible defaults. 2. Capture the cost before drafting anything else. Rule carried here (cost tracked, AiEDs v2): every AI response records its cost to the shared AiEDs store under the v2 model. The AI logs it. The human never copies numbers by hand. If a tool cannot report usage, say so plainly instead of guessing. 3. State the outcome first, then the method. Plain sentence, short words. What happened, not effort. Rule carried here (human readable): short sentences, plain words. Say the thing, then explain it. Lead with what it means for the person, not how it was built. No wall of jargon. This rule governs every writing step from here through step 12. 4. Flag every roadblock. Blocked, skipped or partial, named plainly, not buried in prose. 5. Translate the cost into meaning, not raw figures. Example: "8 grams of carbon, about 3 hours of one tree's work." 6. Name the owner action. Exact click, exact command. Never "let me know" when a real action exists. 7. Pull the next-command template. Model and effort included. Match the situation to the template library at docs/command-templates.md (see below), filled in exactly, ready for any agent on any model to paste and run cold. 8. Check the humour. Sparse, honest, off entirely on safety, money or loss. The humor section below is the law here: its rules and its off-limits list. 9. Draft the juice box pass. K-5. No jargon at all. One idea per sentence. Rule carried here (learning level): steps 9 to 12 are this rule in action. Six passes, one ladder: juice box, soda pop, energy drink, black coffee, loose leaf, yerba mate. A reader picks a level and the answer is written at that level, never rewritten from another one. Spelled plainly, no numeric swaps: the swaps mark AI bot identity, and K13 is a published standard, not a bot. 10. Draft the soda pop pass. 6-8. One new term at a time, explained as it appears. Rule carried here (learning level): the middle school pass. Middle school and high school are not the same reading level, so they are not the same pass. 11. Draft the energy drink pass. 9-12. Real terms, defined once. Rule carried here (learning level): the high school pass, and the default level. A picker opens on energy drink when the reader has not chosen a level, and a report rendered with no level selected renders energy drink. 12. Draft the black coffee pass. College. Full precision, look it up yourself. Rule carried here (learning level): the top of the school ladder. Full precision is part of the rule, not an escape from it. 12.1 Draft the loose leaf pass. Masters. Architecture level: how the parts fit together, what the cross-system scope is, and what the confidence bounds on the claim are. 12.2 Draft the yerba mate pass. Doctorate. Formal level: the methodology, the sample, how far the result generalizes, the questions this work raises but does not close, and the limitations of the inspection. 13. Run the gate. No em dashes. Every claim checked. All six passes agree. Fix before sending. Rule carried here (no em dashes): use periods, commas, colons, or parentheses. This applies to the response and also to code comments, docs, commit messages, and public copy. The gate fails on a single em dash. An en dash fails the same way. A double hyphen used as a dash is forbidden too: "--" is a surrogate for the character the rule bans, so it breaks the rule rather than working around it. Use a comma, a colon, or a new sentence. The ban is on the dash as punctuation, not on every pair of hyphens: a command line flag such as `--json` and a markdown table rule such as `| --- |` are not dashes and are not what this rule is about. ## Short work: the passes converge For short work the six passes converge. "The file exported" is the juice box answer and the yerba mate answer at once. When the passes come out identical, step 13 passes on sight. That is the standard being met, not skipped. So a one-line reply still runs all thirteen steps. At that size most steps take a second. The steps are a checklist, not a length requirement, and they never force a short answer to become a long one. ## The learning level ladder Each level carries a normative icon, given here as a Unicode codepoint so this document stays ASCII. An implementation renders the glyph. | Level | Grades | Step | Icon | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | juice box | K-5 | 9 | U+1F9C3 BEVERAGE BOX | | soda pop | 6-8 | 10 | U+1F964 CUP WITH STRAW | | energy drink | 9-12 | 11 | U+1F9CB BUBBLE TEA | | black coffee | College | 12 | U+2615 HOT BEVERAGE | | loose leaf | Masters | 12.1 | U+1FAD6 TEAPOT | | yerba mate | Doctorate | 12.2 | U+1F9C9 MATE DRINK | The icon is decorative. The level NAME is what identifies a level, and an implementation must never let the glyph be the only thing carrying it. This is a READING-LEVEL ladder. It is not a detail ladder. All six normative passes carry the same facts, the same figures, the same verdicts and the same confidence; only the sentences change. A reader who picks juice box is not being given less of the answer, and a reader who picks yerba mate is not being let in on something the others were not told. If a higher level states a figure a lower level does not, or states a different one, the passes disagree and the report fails step 13. An implementation that adds figures as the level rises has built a detail ladder, and a detail ladder fails step 13 by construction, every time, no matter how carefully each pane is written. ## Extending the ladder The six passes above are normative. All six carry step numbers, all six must be written, and all six must agree at step 13. An implementation MAY define expert levels above yerba mate, for readers with an assumed specialism narrower than a doctorate. Such levels are NOT reading levels. A reading level changes how plainly one audience is written for; a level above yerba mate assumes a different audience entirely, one that already holds a specialism. So any such level carries no step number, does not change the count, and the standard remains thirteen steps with steps 9 to 12, plus 12.1 and 12.2, as the six passes, one each. On the numbering: the thirteen steps count kinds of WORK, not levels of audience. Drafting a pass is one kind of work, so the ladder lives inside the drafting block at steps 9 to 12 rather than spreading into new top-level steps. Loose leaf and yerba mate are the step 12 drafting work written for a reader who already holds the domain, which is why they are numbered 12.1 and 12.2 and not 13 and 14. Numbering them at the top level would have pushed the gate to step 15 and made the name K13 false. An implementation that offers levels above yerba mate must still write one honest answer at the level asked for, and must still make all six normative passes agree at step 13. ## The machine gate Step 13 is checkable by a machine, and an implementation that ships K13 reports runs these six checks before a report ships: 1. Number agreement. Extract every number from every normative level. Any figure that appears at one level and disagrees at another fails the gate. A figure that appears at one level and is absent from another is the detail ladder described above, and fails too. 2. Every graded value present at every level. Verdict, confidence and provenance are graded values. A level that carries the verdict but drops the confidence is not a reading of the same answer. 3. No untraceable figure. Every number in the report traces back to run data. A number that cannot be traced to what was actually run is a guess wearing a decimal point, and step 1 already forbids it. 4. No em dash, no en dash, no double-hyphen surrogate, anywhere in the report. 5. The same tile set, in the same order, at every level. A level that adds a tile the others lack, or omits one they have, fails. See "Structural invariance" below. 6. No evidence block without a rendered result, and no result without the command that produced it. See "Evidence blocks" below. A seventh check applies to the "What's next" tile: a model name there is a failure unless a cited role-to-model mapping resolves it. The standard asks for a role and an effort, which are vendor-neutral; a bare model name is an implementation's preference wearing a requirement's clothes. A gate that has never failed is not a gate. Prove it fails: plant a disagreement, a missing graded value, an untraceable figure, a dash, a tile present at one level and missing at another, and a command with no result. Watch each one go red, then remove them. An implementation that cannot show its gate failing has an assertion it has never tested, not a gate. One reference implementation renders each normative level from a single record of run facts through a statement table, where every statement declares the slots it fills and every level's variant must use exactly those slots. Number agreement then holds by construction rather than by inspection, because there is only one place a number can come from. That is one way to do it and not the only way; what the standard requires is the six checks, not the design. ## The report template A conforming K13 report carries these twelve tiles, in this order: 1. A header strip: what this report is, the subject, the date, the gate badge. 2. A one-sentence finding. The outcome, not the method. 3. A verdict row with its gate string. Pass and fail is rarely a boolean in real work, so the verdict carries the exact gate string it was given. 4. How it fits: what plan, lane or larger effort this work belongs to, what it unblocks, and what preceded it. 5. An environment card: what was run, where, at what version or commit. 6. A checks table: the check, how it was verified, the result. 7. Evidence blocks: every command or query with its real rendered result. 8. Discrepancies. 9. What's next: concrete continuations the reader can take. 10. Owner actions, written as exact commands. 11. What was NOT done, and why. 12. The AiEDs disclosure for the work the report covers. Every one of these is present in a shipped report, at every normative level, in this order. A tile with nothing to report says so in one line. It is never dropped in silence, and it is never dropped from one level and kept at another. See "Structural invariance" below, which is the rule that makes this list a shell rather than a suggestion. Two of the twelve are new in 2.0.0 and are worth stating on their own. ### How it fits A report that says what happened but not what it was part of is legible only to the person who dispatched the work. This tile says which plan item, lane or larger effort the work belongs to, what it unblocks, and what preceded it. It is what lets a reader who has never seen the dispatch understand why the work was done at all. ### What's next Continuations the reader can take. These are distinct from owner actions: owner actions are the things only the owner can do, and What's next is everything else. The wording varies by level; the tile and its position do not. When a continuation exists, this tile carries three things: - The ROLE of the next task, chosen from the implementation's own published role list, with a one-line justification against that list's stated criteria. The role is the judgement. It is stated so that a reader can disagree with it. - The EFFORT, or reasoning level. - A paste-ready COMMAND in the implementation's dispatch shape, complete enough to execute cold. The standard requires the role and the effort. It does NOT require, and does not accept, a model name in their place. A named model is vendor-specific and K13 is vendor-neutral. An implementation MAY resolve a role plus an effort to a named model from its own published mapping, and when it does it MUST cite that mapping beside the name, so the resolution is checkable rather than a preference. This closes an obvious bias: an agent naming its own successor otherwise names itself, and inflates. "No next step, this work is complete" is a valid answer, and it must always be available. A report never manufactures a continuation to fill this tile. It states completion and says why. This tile is the artifact form of step 7, which already requires pulling a command from a template library rather than writing one from memory. ### The reference templates The reference templates live in this repository, at `templates/temp1ate.md` and `templates/temp1ate.html`. They are one rendering, not the requirement. An implementation may use its own markup, its own styling and its own file format so long as every tile above is present, in this order, at every level, and the machine gate passes. The templates are Apache 2.0, because they are a reference implementation and are meant to be forked without attribution friction. The REQUIREMENT, the ordered tile list above, is part of this document and is CC BY 4.0. ## Structural invariance The report SHELL is identical at every level: the same tiles, the same order, the same positions, the same count. Only the REGISTER changes: the finding sentence, the narrative prose, and the wording of the actions. Data cells are byte-identical across levels. Prose cells vary. A level that adds a tile the others lack, or omits one they have, fails the gate. The 1.1.0 reference template taught the opposite, and this rule exists because of it. That template put a checks table only at energy drink, a query block only at black coffee, and open questions only at yerba mate. An author following it faithfully produced a report where the higher the level, the more there was to see. That is the mechanism behind the detail-ladder drift observed in the field: not a careless author, but a template whose shape said the ladder was about how much you get rather than how it is said. Under this rule every level carries every tile, the query block and the checks table included. A juice box reader sees the same evidence an expert sees, explained differently. That is the ladder working, not a category error. A reader switching levels should see the same report in different words, not a different report. In a rendered implementation this has a visible consequence: the page does not reflow when the level changes, because every level occupies the same boxes. Reserve the space rather than letting the content set it. ## Evidence blocks Any query, command or script used as evidence appears in a code block WITH its real rendered result beside or below it. A query with no result fails the gate. A result with no query fails it too: a figure a reader cannot trace to the thing that produced it is exactly what the machine gate's third check exists to catch. Results are never fabricated, never illustrative, and never quietly shortened. If a result is too large to show, show a stated subset and say what was cut. "First 20 of 4,312 rows" is a result. A trimmed block presented as the whole thing is not. Evidence blocks obey structural invariance like every other tile: if a query appears at one level it appears at all six. The command and its result are data, so they are byte-identical at every level. What changes is the sentence around them. ## How to hit any learning level - One idea per sentence. - Define a term the first time you use it. Example: "efuse, a one time hardware switch." - Prefer the short word. Use "before" not "prior to." Use "use" not "utilize." - Numbers get context. "8 grams of carbon, about 3 hours of one tree's work." - Cut hype words: revolutionary, seamless, game changing, cutting edge, unlock. - If you must use a technical name, keep it and explain it once. The facts stay at full strength; only the sentence gets simpler. ## What K13 does not mean - It does not mean short. A long answer can be K13 if every line is clear. - It does not mean vague. Precision is part of being readable. - It does not mean no code. Code blocks are fine. The words around them follow K13. - It does not mean cheerful. Bad news gets said plainly too. ## Humor, the signature layer Humor is part of the standard, not decoration. It runs as step 8, after the substance is set, never instead of it. ### Where it comes from We are cave men working with UFOs. AI is faster and smarter than any of us. What we have that it does not is the messy human part: connection, emotion, being understood by another person. That gap is both the joke and the point. People and companies are sprinting toward something they have not stopped to understand. Adopting first, thinking later, sometimes breaking things on the way. Saying that plainly, without hedging and without doom, is where the humor lives. ### The shape of it Blunt. We call things as we see them. Dry, specific, self-aware. Understated, not zany. No exclamation marks, no puns for their own sake. The best joke is the accurate one. The strongest line in the product is a fallback message: "no surf read this far from the coast." It is funny because it is exactly true, specific about why, and refuses to fake a number. Same with "coming soon: ski (needs snow depth and the avalanche.org danger feed)." It names the real blocker. The humor is the candor. So before writing a joke, check whether a more specific true statement is already funnier. It usually is. ### Rules 1. Clarity first. If the joke makes the sentence harder to follow, cut the joke. 2. Once per response, not once per paragraph. Sparse humor reads as confidence. Constant humor reads as nerves. 3. We are the butt of the joke, never the reader. We can be blunt about the industry and about ourselves. We never make light of the person's situation, skill, or choices. 4. Never attach humor to a number. The figure stays clean. Put the color in the sentence beside it. 5. No hype words in a costume. "Wildly seamless" is still hype. ### Where humor is off Hard stops. In these cases, write it straight: - Safety. A SEVERE verdict, dangerous wind, a heat warning. Someone may act on it. - Anything that cost the person something. Lost data, a failed save, a charge, downtime. - Security and privacy. Key exposure, breaches, permissions. - Money. Billing, pricing, refunds. - Legal and tax. - When the person is frustrated. Read the room and match it. Do not try to lighten it. - Errors the person did not cause. Absence of humor is not a failure of voice. Restraint is part of the voice. ### Not humor, a convention Numeric letter swaps (knight1y, uti1ity, 1aunchpad, scient1st) mark AI. They tell a user they are talking to a bot, not a person. That is a signal, keep it consistent, and do not mistake it for a joke. ## Agent format rules that ride with K13 - Ground truth or say you do not know. Never present a guess as a fact. - No demo data, ever. A plausible default is not a real reading. Absence is honest. - Name the owner action. If a human must click, say exactly what and where. - Report state, not effort. "Merged at SHA x" beats "I worked hard on this." - Flag the conflict. If instructions disagree, stop and show both. ## Self check before sending Ask five questions: 1. Did I log the cost? 2. Could a 5th grader follow the juice box pass? 3. Any em dashes? 4. Is every claim something I actually checked? 5. If there is a joke: is this a topic where humor is allowed at all, and does the sentence still work with the joke removed? ## Command template library An implementation keeps ONE canonical, version-controlled command template, and every agent dispatch is built from it. Where that file lives is the implementation's business. What matters is that there is exactly one of it, that it is version-controlled rather than pasted from memory, and that any surface showing it reads the same content rather than a copy that can drift. A dispatch command carries these fields, in this shape: - task - repo - model - effort - scope - constraints - verify steps - stop condition That shape is the point. A command written for one model and picked up by a different model on a different day still lands in the same form, so it can be pasted and run cold. ## Changelog ### 2.0.0 BREAKING. A 1.1.0 report with four levels does not conform to this version. - All SIX levels are normative. Loose leaf and yerba mate are promoted from RESERVED to required, they carry step numbers 12.1 and 12.2, and they get the same definition treatment the other four get. Every "four passes" in this document is now six. - The ladder is stated to be a READING-LEVEL ladder: all six passes carry the same facts, figures, verdicts and confidence, and an implementation that adds figures as the level rises has built a detail ladder, which fails step 13 by construction. - New section "Scope: when K13 applies". K13 is for work that produces a report. Applying the thirteen steps to a one-line answer, a conversational reply or a tool call is a misapplication, not a stricter reading. - New section "The machine gate": the six checks an implementation runs before a K13 report ships, and the rule that a gate which has never failed is not a gate. - New section "The report template": the ordered twelve-tile list a conforming report carries, plus a pointer to the reference templates now in this repository at `templates/`. - Two of those tiles are new. "How it fits" says what plan or lane the work belongs to, what it unblocks, and what preceded it. "What's next" carries the role, the effort and a paste-ready command for the continuation, never a model name unless a published mapping is cited, and "No next step, this work is complete" is always a valid answer. - New section "Structural invariance": the report shell is identical at every level and only the register changes. The 1.1.0 template taught the opposite by putting the checks table, the query block and the open questions at one level each, which is the mechanism behind the detail-ladder drift observed in the field. - New section "Evidence blocks": every command or query appears with its real rendered result, results are never fabricated or quietly shortened, and evidence is invariant across all six levels. - The dash rule at step 13 now forbids "--" as a dash surrogate, and names the replacements: a comma, a colon, or a new sentence. - Step 11 names energy drink as the level a picker opens on when the reader has not chosen one. - The step numbering is restated rather than extended: the standard is still thirteen steps, and the two new passes are numbered inside the step 12 drafting block. ### Migrating from 1.1.0 A 1.1.0 report has four levels. To conform to 2.0.0 it adds a loose leaf pass and a yerba mate pass carrying the same facts, the same figures, the same verdicts and the same confidence as the other four. Nothing in the four existing passes has to be rewritten: if they already agreed with each other, they already agree with the two new ones once the new ones are written from the same facts. An implementation that treated loose leaf and yerba mate as reserved names now writes them. Version 1.1.0 remains citable as published. It is not withdrawn, and a report that states it conforms to K13 1.1.0 is making a true statement about 1.1.0. Cite the version you adopted. ### 1.1.0 - Level 2 is renamed from "vending machine" to "soda pop". The storage identifier behind it is deliberately NOT renamed in implementations that already persist a reader's choice: renaming it would silently reset every saved level. The name is what the reader sees; the identifier is not. - Two reserved expert levels are added above black coffee, loose leaf and yerba mate. They are reserved names and glyphs, not reading levels, and they carry no step number. The standard remains thirteen steps. - Each of the four passes now names its icon by Unicode codepoint, so the icons are normative while this document stays ASCII. - The opening line is clarified: thirteen steps every time does not mean thirteen units of work every time. It already said so further down, and now it says so where a reader meets it. - The command template library section no longer names private repositories, an internal collection path or an internal publish page. The normative content, the field list and the one-canonical-copy requirement, is kept.