flashyos-spec

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The formats, their schemas, and the corpora that settle arguments about them.

Apache-2.0 specifications for organisational accountability on the agentic web: who is accountable, which lanes an organisation opens, what shipped, and what a stranger may verify offline. Every format ships a conformance corpus as data — and most of every corpus is refusals.

Not released yet. Carried out of a private monorepo with its real history, which is a decision rather than a build.

Everything below is the design and the reasoning. The code lands before this repository is tagged, and the version stays at 0.0.0 until it does.

Using it

Planned — not present until the format packages are migrated. The profiles/, schema/ and src/ trees the commands below read do not exist in this repository yet, so nothing in this section is runnable today. Carrying the packages out of the monorepo, with their real history, is the gating step — see Status. This section describes how the specifications will be used once that operation runs.

The design is that there is nothing to install and nothing to fetch: every format, its JSON Schema and its conformance corpus will be plain files in this repository, read like this —

git clone https://github.com/flashylabs/flashyos-spec && cd flashyos-spec
ls profiles/
# aao-0.1  backlog-1  checkpoint-1  directory-1
# flashyos-1  frontdoor-1  shipped-1  …

jq '.sets[0] | {accept, refuse}' profiles/frontdoor-1/conformance.json
# { "accept": 5, "refuse": 22 }

Reading them over the wire instead is a convenience, and it is deliberately not the documented path: a specification you can only obtain from its author's running web server is one whose availability is that author's to withdraw. specs/1 is the index those same files will be published through, once this repository carries them.

The invariants

Everything here follows from these. Each is enforced by something rather than promised, because a rule with nothing behind it erodes one convenience at a time.

Invariant	Why	Enforced by
The refusals are the substance	Any implementation accepts a valid document; disagreement lives in what must be rejected	22 of frontdoor/1’s 27 vectors are refusals, each naming one rule
Verification never requires us	A format whose checking needs its author’s service is one you should refuse	The verifier is offline, with no account and no network call
A published file proves control of a host	It does not prove an organisation is who it says it is, and the difference is the whole point	The caution is normative and a validator rejects a document that alters it
A derived field may never be asserted	A caller who could write one could claim a fact nothing computed	Refused by name in the validator as well as the writer
A correction is appended, never edited	History you can edit is not evidence	revise and superseding entries; the original stays

It works alone

No account, no API key, no telemetry, and no network call unless you ask for one. If anything here ever needs a service of ours to answer, that is a bug — you would be right to refuse a checker with a dependency on the party being checked. That applies to the documentation too: the design is that every documented command runs against a file in this repository, never our domain, because a README whose first line fetches from us is one that stops working when we do. The commands that will do so are marked planned above, because the files they read do not land until the packages migrate — a README that claimed they ran today would be committing exactly the sin this paragraph names.

What flashyos-spec is not

• Not a competitor to A2A, MCP or agents.txt. Those settled the capability layer and left accountability explicitly out of scope. This is that layer, and it points at theirs rather than restating it.
• Not a registry. The formats are free and forkable. What a registry adds — re-verification over time — is a service, and it is not what this repository is.
• Not adopted. As at this commit, no organisation outside the estate that wrote these has been verified serving one. That number is published rather than rounded up.

Status

The specifications are not here yet. They are Apache-2.0 today; carrying the packages out of the monorepo they were written in, with their real commit history, is a deliberate operation rather than a copy — a chain of title that begins on the day somebody remembered to copy the files is not a chain of title. Until that runs, this repository is the licence, the security policy and the direction.

Contributing

The most useful thing you can send is an implementation that disagrees with ours about a refusal. Two implementations that have never met, agreeing about what to reject, is the only real evidence a specification says what it means.

Sign-off rather than a copyright assignment — see CONTRIBUTING.md. There is no CLA.

Licence

Apache-2.0, copyright Flashy Labs. The rules are open and the tooling is open; fork either, and check ours against yours.

The formats these were written for

directory/1, frontdoor/1, countersign/1, backlog/1, shipped/1 and the rest are Apache-2.0 and specified in the open at github.com/flashylabs. Nothing in them requires an account, a key, or a call to us — including the checking.