Preclari
An AI-preflight layer for workflows entering regulated processes. It makes a decision's reasoning explicit, and checkable, before the decision executes.
I am building Preclari as the check I kept running by hand: the one that belongs before an AI-assisted decision enters a regulated process, not after.
The problem
An AI agent can produce work that reads as authoritative and is partly invented. In development that is cheap to catch: version control remembers the last good state, tests go red, a reviewer reads the diff. In a regulated process the catching system is the audit, the inspection, the regulator's question months later. By then the failure is not a red test. It is a deviation report, a paused line, a finding.
What Preclari does
Preclari is a preflight layer. It sits in front of decisions entering regulated processes and makes their reasoning explicit before they execute. The check is structural, runs every time, and does not depend on how confident the agent sounded. The point is to find the fault on the ground, where it is cheap, not in flight.
It names what an agent would otherwise leave implicit: which regulations apply, with citations; which controls are present and which are missing; what was assumed when the input was incomplete; what was left out of scope, and why; and the steps a reviewer can run to check each conclusion independently.
PIF, the open specification
Preclari is built around an open specification, so the artifact it produces outlives any single tool. PIF, the Preflight Interchange Format, is an open specification under Apache 2.0: v0.1 is the current version, and v0.2 is a draft. Uncertainty is a required field, not optional prose, so a document that hides its limits fails validation rather than passing quietly.
The specification is open so that anyone who distrusts the vendor can do more than read it. They can take the format and require different things. The choice of what to check stops being only mine. Read the spec: PIF v0.1, with v0.2 as a draft.
The thesis
Authority asks you to trust it. Authorship builds the means of not having to. A preflight is the second move: it externalises the check, surfaces what was done, and makes the limits of the work visible before anything executes. I have written about why that distinction matters in The Backdoor You Keep for Yourself.