The Zui constitution

The chaos it answers

Machines now generate interfaces faster than anyone can review them, and a generator reproduces every habit of the pages it learned from: a menu that hides its entries, a button labelled with a state instead of an action, text set small to look elegant, a page that glides when you asked to jump, an error that blames the person who met it. Each habit looks harmless alone.

Together they make the chaos of vibe-coded applications, where every screen behaves differently and nobody can say why. Guidelines did not stop it, because a guideline asks for taste and a generator has none. Zui is written as law instead: every rule names what to avoid, what to do, why, and who enforces it, and a verifier refuses a page that breaks a rule a machine can check.

The law

Constitution version 3.11 of 2026-08-16; the verifier passes 50 of 50 conformance fixtures and conforms at level 4; two consuming products are pinned to it. Read in the constitution's repository on 2026-10-01; that repository is not public yet, and this site will link it the day it is. This site itself follows the legibility floor: its reading text is 19 pixels, and nothing is set small to say it matters less.

The Softanza way Someone has to write the principles down in a form a machine can refuse to violate. Guidelines did not stop the decay of interfaces. A law can.

This site, under the law

This site is built under the constitution, and its build checks what a machine can check. The rules it applies, each one where you can see it:

• One reading size (Rule 107). Every text you read here is set at the same size; a title is larger, and nothing is set smaller to say it matters less.
• The legibility floor (Rule 105). Every pair of text and background colours is measured by the build, which stops if one falls below its threshold; the words over the photograph on the home page are measured over its brightest part.
• Motion reports, it never decorates (Rules 112 and 17). Nothing glides, fades or bounces: a link takes you where you asked, at once.
• The path shows every depth (Rules 108, 115 and 120). Beside the page, a rail lists every page of the section and, under the page you are in, its own pages; above the title, a trail gives the path from the home page to the page you are on. The second level runs vertical, never as a second row under the menu.
• Nothing floats over the reading (Rule 110). The bars hold their own space; nothing hovers over the text or the pictures.
• No sideways scroll (Rules 14 and 95). Code wraps inside its block, tables stay tables at every width, and every diagram has a second drawing made for a phone. The rail never scrolls sideways: on a narrow screen it folds into one line under the menu that opens on request.
• The verb on the button (Rule 106). The display buttons at the foot of every page say what they do.

What the audit found

in construction The constitution's own audit, the tool that measures Rules 105, 107, 108, 114, 115 and 116 on the rendered page, was run on this site twice on 2026-10-09, at 1280 pixels, in the light theme and in the dark one, on 188 pages: the home page, all 91 English and all 91 French section pages, and five deeper ones (a narration, two reference pages, a guide and an atlas page), not the thousands of reference and narration pages in between. The first run, at 04:18 and 04:21 UTC, found 368 violations in the light theme and 340 in the dark one. A repair wave followed. The second run, at 11:29 and 11:31 UTC, found 46 in the light theme and 22 in the dark one. A smaller change to the footer names followed, and the third run, at 11:57 and 11:59 UTC, found 40 in the light theme and 16 in the dark one. This site is not clean yet, and what remains is below.

What the repair changed, each measured by the runs after it:

• Rule 108, a trail from the root: 182 pages had none, none lacks one now. Every page of a section shows its path from the home page under the section bar, every step a link but the one you are on, marked the way the constitution marks a trail. The section bar stays: it lists the pages of the section, and the trail says where the section sits. The author's question was whether the bar was enough, and the answer taken is no, since the rule names section landings without a path of their own as the thing to avoid.
• Rule 114, room before scrollbars: the section bar scrolled sideways on 80 pages, it scrolls on none. It and the trail wrap onto a second line on a laptop and scroll only on a phone, where the page has run out of room.
• Rules 105 and 107, the floor: the choice lists of the narrations page were 13.3 pixels, they are 16. That was 62 findings.
• Rule 105, contrast: the page counter of the presentation, laid bare over a photograph, now has its own backing. Four findings, none now.
• Rule 116, the menu against the tree: 6 findings, none now. The footer map named the first page of three sections by its own title, the north star, agentic, audiences, where the menu and the trail named the section: Vision, Intelligence, Adopt. The audit took the footer map for a menu and called it one page with two names, and it was right about the names. The first page of those three sections now carries the section's name in the footer map and the section bar, as Platform, Narrations and Learn already did. The page keeps its own title as its heading.

What remains:

• Rule 115, the path reads the same at every step: 16 findings, 8 per language. The trail of a section's first page ends at the section, and the trail of another page of the section goes on to that page; the audit wants one identical path on both, with only the highlight moving. Here the levels below the section sit in the section bar, a second row the audit does not read, and the choice made is to keep two rows rather than fold them into one. The same finding is raised on the deeper pages, whose trail goes down to the page.
• Rule 105, contrast: 24 findings in the light theme, none in the dark one, all on the home page, the menu laid over the photograph. The audit cannot see an image and measured the colour beneath it. The site's own build measures that menu against the photograph's brightest pixels and passes it. An AI model also looked at the home page in the light theme, at laptop and phone width, and read the menu without difficulty; an AI model's reading is not a person's verdict, so none is recorded and this stays unperceived. Looking found one fault the audit could not: on a phone, the line saying the picture's provenance is not recorded lay over the arrow that scrolls down. It now follows in the page's flow. The menu is left as the author drew it, text with its own dark edge and no bar, which is a deliberate exception to Rule 110 on the home page only.

What this audit cannot see: an image, a state that needs a hand (hover, focus, a menu opened), any width but 1280 pixels, and any page it was not given. The trail is marked with the label the rule prescribes, the English word Breadcrumb, on the French pages too. An AI model read the reports and wrote this; a clean report would still prove agreement with a rule, not that a person finds the page right.

Since the audit

in construction On 2026-10-15 the author showed a section of this site with three rows of navigation stacked under one another, and asked for the structure to be rethought from the reader's side. Six readers then went through the site, each with one question: a newcomer, a programmer, the head of IT of a bank, a teacher, an analyst who designs screens, and an AI coding agent. All six met what Rule 120 forbids, a second level of navigation laid out as a second row. The second row is gone: a rail beside the page carries the second level, the trail opens the page and ends on it, and the menu holds seven sections cut by the question a reader comes with. The pages that told the same thing twice were merged, and six titles now say what their page holds.

in construction The audit was run again on this structure on 2026-10-15, at 21:26 and 21:28 UTC, at 1280 pixels, on 182 pages: the home page, every section page in both languages, and five deeper pages. It found 55 findings in the light theme and 33 in the dark one. Rules 108, 114 and 116, and the size floor of Rules 105 and 107, have none. The 22 contrast findings are the home menu over the photograph, in the light theme only, which the audit cannot see. The 33 findings of Rule 115 come from how the audit reads a path: it compares the trails of the pages along a branch and wants them identical, where on this site the trail names only the levels above the page and the rail beside it shows the whole branch, the same on every page of a section with only the highlight moving. The rail is the path the rule describes; the audit does not read it yet, and that is reported to the constitution's maintainers.

in construction The audit was run again on 2026-10-17, at 03:06 and 03:09 UTC, at 1280 pixels, on 183 pages, after the four-level navigation, the six reader pages and the area reference pages: 84 findings in the light theme and 62 in the dark one. Rules 114 and 116 and the size floor have none. 60 are Rule 108, the same 60 pages in both themes: a page one level under a section no longer shows a trail, on the author's word, because the menu and the second bar already mark both of its levels; the amendment of Rule 108 is asked of the constitution's maintainers. 22 are the home menu over the photograph, in the light theme, which the audit cannot measure. 2 are Rule 115: a class page's trail cannot name the method page below it. A first run of the same day also reported 48 area names at 1.28:1, whose real contrast is 14.80:1: the audit read a colour written as color-mix() as black. The site now writes that colour plainly, and the reading is reported too.