The Kladde 26 Manifesto - Show Your Workings

For background and context, read the introduction.

v1.0.0 — 17 September 2026

We use language models to produce written work. Not everything we make carries this mark. Where it does, these are the terms.

We do not take credit for what we did not do

Where the language or the ideas came from a language model, we say so. We mould, polish and revise. We do not disguise.

We claim credit for what we did

The seeding, the direction, the choosing, the rejecting and the reshaping are ours. We name them with the same plainness.

We answer for the text

Every error is ours: the invented fact, the libel, the bias, the sentence that is merely wrong. It makes no difference whether we wrote it or the model did. We do not hide behind the tool.

We do not measure

We publish no metric claiming a share of the work. We hand the reader the evidence instead.

We show our workings

A transcript, an edited transcript, or a description of the process. The form is ours to choose. It must be enough for a reader to see where the writing came from. Where we have edited the workings, we say how.

Our workings travel with the work

Wherever the work goes, the workings go with it, or a durable link does. Where the workings cannot follow, the line telling the reader where to find them must.

Furthermore

There is no rule here about how the writing is made. Nothing here says what a model may draft, how much of that may stand, or how little of it is ours. These terms are about the telling, not the making.

We ask nothing of anyone else. We do not ask for writing made this way to be labelled by third parties, restricted, praised or condemned. We ask only that when it is published it is not passed off as something it was not.