Every instruction, in plain sight.
GuideCheck defines the Human-Verifiable Assistant Guide profile — a constrained plain-text artifact for the install, setup, and remediation instructions an AI assistant will act on.
AI-assisted setup guidance reaches assistants through HTML, rendered Markdown, PDFs, and copied terminal output. Those surfaces can carry text a model ingests but a human never sees — hidden comments, white-on-white text, invisible Unicode controls. For high-consequence tasks, the instruction surface should be something a human can read in full first.
![The assistant-guide.txt artifact shown in full as plain text: a filename header, three [action] blocks reading Identify user intent, Formulate plan, and Generate response, and an End of file marker, beside a six-rung conformance ladder numbered 0 to 5.](/imgs/og.png)
What the profile defines
The profile describes one artifact: a .txt file named assistant-guide.txt, served at /.well-known/assistant-guide.txt. It carries assistant-facing install, implementation, remediation, migration, and operational instructions for a single bounded task. Three properties make that surface reviewable.
Bounded and reviewable
A strict ASCII byte profile and an 8 KiB size cap, so the whole instruction surface can be read in one sitting — no hidden bytes, no homoglyphs, no offscreen text.
Structured actions
Explicit [action] blocks with declared classes, approval gates, and command restrictions. The assistant executes blocks, never loose prose.
Verifiable provenance
A sidecar manifest plus cross-channel hash publication, so a guide's identity can be confirmed without trusting any single hosted service.
Conformance is not safety
Conformance to this profile, at any level, does not mean a guide is safe to follow, that the publisher is trustworthy, or that an assistant may skip the security practices a competent operator would already apply. A verifier confirms form. The human confirms meaning. The standard is one layer in a defense stack — it does not replace sandboxing, least privilege, or human approval.
Six conformance levels
The conformance ladder is additive and honest. Each level states exactly what it has checked and what it has not. Higher levels add structure and provenance — never a safety claim.
| Level | What it establishes |
|---|---|
| 0 | Instructions are only available through surfaces that can hide or transform text. |
| 1 | A plain-text guide exists, is reachable, and carries the compact verification instruction. |
| 2 | Strict ASCII byte profile, size limits, and no disallowed constructs. |
| 3 | Assistant safety contract, all required sections, and explicit approval gates. |
| 4 | Verifiable provenance: a sidecar manifest and a cross-channel hash on an independent control plane. |
| 5 | A guide plus a conformant assistant runtime that mechanically enforces the execution contract. |
Level 4 adds verifiable provenance but not a safety claim. Level 5 is explicitly a guide-plus-runtime claim, not a guide-only claim, because runtime behavior cannot be asserted by a file.
Adopt the profile
Publishing a conformant guide is plain-text work. Write the artifact, serve it at the well-known path, and check it against the verifier conformance profile. No registry, no account, no central oracle.
assistant-guide.txt
[assistant-guide-metadata] identifier: assistant-guide profile: human-verifiable-assistant-guide profile-version: 0.1.0 guide-version: 0.1.0 applies-to: example-project 1.x canonical-url: https://example.com/.well-known/assistant-guide.txt source-path: /.well-known/assistant-guide.txt last-reviewed: 2026-05-21 status: active recommended-verifier: https://guidecheck.org/verify [/assistant-guide-metadata]
Strict ASCII, 8 KiB maximum, plain text only — no HTML, no Markdown, no hidden bytes.
Serve and verify
# Serve the artifact at the well-known path GET /.well-known/assistant-guide.txt # Run a conformant verifier against the URL. # Output reports: guide SHA-256, achieved # level, and any blocking findings. # A conformance claim is valid only when # backed by verifier output, guide hash, # achieved level, and findings.
Anyone may build a conformant verifier. The fixture suite keeps independent implementations in agreement.
Verify a guide
GuideCheck publishes a primary verifier for usability — never as the only authoritative verifier and never as a root of trust. It reports what it checked and what it did not.