The Cut #0 — the contract

This is the launch issue, and it recommends nothing. What it sets out instead is the standard every issue after it will be held to.

Nothing gets named here unless we ran it ourselves that week. The real tool, the real model, against a fixture with planted traps: an unverified claim it must not report as fact, a missing number it must not invent. The test date and the exact model name go on the page. New things enter as experimental with a re-test deadline, and on that date they either graduate or get retired.

When something hyped fails our traps, we say so, and we name the trap that broke it. You shouldn’t have to spend an afternoon finding that out yourself.

Retirement is public. When advice we published stops being true, whether it was debunked, superseded, or broken by a model release, it goes to the retirement record with a post-mortem: what we claimed, what changed, and what we missed when we admitted it. The page stays up. Advice that can’t be retired can’t be trusted.

If nothing clears the bar, the issue is one paragraph saying so. We will never manufacture a section to fill a slot. The kill rate on the scoreboard is the running proof.

One more thing worth knowing: this site is drafted with AI assistance, and our editorial policy treats that as a bias to be measured and capped rather than denied. The only criterion is whether something helps a PM do better work.

That’s the contract. The first cycle ran the same day, so here is a result rather than a promise. Reviewed 6, tested 0, cleared the bar 0.

Four of the six were developer-facing or off topic: API-only transcription models, API price cuts, a protocol spec, a health feature. One was genuinely interesting. Google Slides can now generate a deck from a description and copy an existing deck’s formatting, which competes directly with tools two of our playbooks rely on. We’re not telling you about it yet, because we couldn’t get access to run it. The sixth was a model release whose 1M-token context window may quietly invalidate advice already on this site, and that gets re-tested before we touch the page.

Zero is the honest number, so zero is the number.