I run a programme or an institution

What an institution owns

Everything is a folder of plain text: the programme, its courses, its overlay, its cohorts, each learner's work and progress. There is no database to back up, no server to keep running and no account to renew; copying the folder copies the institution's whole learning system, and a version control system reads its history. The system needs the library and one laptop, and it runs offline.

An overlay, never a fork

You do not change the course. You lay your overlay over it: a folder that gives the same chapters your world, your exercises, your languages, your name and your rules.

Core program, the restaurant:            With the bank's overlay laid on (one file):
    bella-cucina (restaurant)                sahel-savings (bank)
    [ "margherita", "tiramisu", "lasagna" ]  [ "transfer", "loan", "deposit" ]
PROVED   the same cell answers about the bank
PROVED   the chapter file did not change by one byte

run on 2026-09-30, the education demo

An overlay can add a chapter, an exercise, a skill or a world; replace a world by name, which is how the same chapter reasons over a bank; map its own skills onto the core's; add a fifth language as a data-only pack; and govern, with rules its learners' AI agents must obey. It cannot edit or delete a core file: it can only shadow one, and every shadowing is listed, so an institution can always see what differs from the core.

The steps of the guide, which is itself checked by a guard that follows them literally:

1. Copy the template folder, and give it a short name: bank, university, ministry.
2. Fill the placeholders: the name, the institution, the world, two things people request there.
3. Write your world: a file of facts, three words per line, ministry-of-education | is-a | ministry, request-1 | requested | transcript. Chapter 1 asks this world what was requested, counts the repeats and removes them.
4. Add an exercise of your own if you want one: a task in each language, a promise, an answer that must fail and an answer that must pass.
5. Run the court. It tells you, by name and in words, what is still wrong: a space inside a word of a world, a file that would replace a core chapter.

The guide: OVERLAY_GUIDE.md(opens in a new tab). Two reference overlays, a bank and a university, are in education/overlays(opens in a new tab); the charter's fifth law (an overlay never forks) is enforced by a guard that swaps two overlays under one chapter and asserts that the core's hash did not change.

Cohorts, reports, ownership

A cohort is a folder of learners who follow one course under one overlay. Its progress report is a narration whose every figure is a promise, so it says by itself when it has gone stale: the teacher's door shows one run. Each learner's progress is a text file in their own folder, written only by the checker and carrying the evidence of every fact; a pass cannot be forged, because its evidence is the fingerprint of the work handed in. At the end of a year the institution holds, as files, who did what and what was proved.

Languages

The course runs in English, French, Arabic (laid out right to left) and Hausa, from the first page; every chapter's guard runs in all four, and a missing translation is a failing guard, not a fallback to English. The French, Arabic and Hausa editions are drafts, and every translated chapter and world page says so (limits below). A fifth language is a data-only pack, and the institution's own words go in its overlay.

Governed AI for learners

A learner's AI agent proposes; only a gate commits. Exercises on agents run in a safe world: a guard asserts that the real tree is unchanged after a student's agent "deletes everything". The tutor itself uses no AI model and needs no network.

A fifteen-minute demonstration for decision makers

The presenter's guide gives a scene for each minute, runs on one laptop offline, and computes every scene while it is shown. Before a meeting, its rehearsal must end with the line DEMO: 20 proved, 0 not proved: if a line reads NOT PROVED, the demo says it would be wrong to present, and would say so in front of the audience too.

The presenter's guide: demo/DEMO.md(opens in a new tab). Its guard runs the demo twice from a clean folder and checks that the two runs say the same thing word for word.

What an institution should know before it starts

The interactive reader runs on the desktop; a browser runtime for the cells is not built yet, and the page says so on every cell. The French, Arabic and Hausa editions await native reviewers (0 of 35 units reviewed); Zarma is not yet a language of the course. No institution has adopted the system yet: the bank's and the university's overlays in the library are references written to show what an overlay is. The tutor is rule-based, not AI. There is no AI model in the loop and none is required: one may be added later as an option, never as the mind of the tutor.