The Licence-Plate Test

Why this exists

A typical enterprise AI deployment is a stack of five or six layers, each owned by a different party, each able to change behaviour without telling the layer above. When something breaks, the logs sit in different systems on different clocks with no joinable timeline. You have a great deal of evidence and no account of what happened.

That ability to reconstruct who-changed-what is not recovered after an incident. It is a design property, installed before or absent forever. This free one-pager is the sharpest instrument from the book Critical Density: a 12-question test you run against one system in about ten minutes, scored the way an auditor scores anything, by asking for the record, not the intention.

$ licence-plate-test --system "your-criticality-4-system"
  item 1  base model + version pinned ...... 0  vendor serves "latest"
  item 4  vendor change vs our change ....... 0  not joinable
  item 9  clocks + ids join across parties .. 0  three clocks disagree
  ... 12 items, scored 0-2 each ............. ? / 24
BAND: red <12  /  amber 12-18  /  green 19+
GATE: no criticality-4 system goes live on a RED

What you get

The 12-question Licence-Plate Test as a ready-to-print PDF and editable Markdown, with the 0/1/2 scoring, the Red/Amber/Green bands, the deployment gate rule, and the reconstruction drill that tells you the truth about whether you can attribute anything. Free, no catch.

Get the free test →