The record hall
A city chatbot once told business owners to break the law, confidently. The public record deserves better: a system that answers only from the adopted record, cites what it answers, and refuses what was never adopted. And because codification always lags, CAIRN finds where your published code disagrees with your adopted law — before a resident's lawyer does.
Four acts, each performed live by the box behind this page — nothing is mocked, and every response's raw JSON is one toggle away. Complete an act to open the next. The finale is yours to cause: a refusal, sealed to a hash-chained ledger, that you then verify with your own hands.
- I · the card shelf
- II · the record speaks
- III · the sweep
- IV · the refusal
- the doors
The ordinance card
The shelf holds cards sealed from the adopted record: Ordinance 2026-04 with its operative language quoted exactly — the ninety-day cap, the roll-call vote by name, the effective date — and an official's card built the same way. Counts and receipts are live.
The record speaks
The adopted ordinance cut the short-term-rental cap to ninety days. The
published Chapter 5 still says one hundred twenty — codification lag, the clerk's quiet
nightmare. Ask the record what the cap is, and watch a grounded answer come back
with [n] citations — both numbers, attributed, never averaged.
The codification lag, caught
Pre-baked passage vectors make the sweep live and model-free: pairs of passages across adopted law and published code whose similarity crosses the threshold surface as candidates — and the pair a clerk fears most is the adopted ordinance against the chapter it amended. Watch it surface.
The ordinance never adopted
No Ordinance 2026-11 was ever adopted in Alder Creek — we made sure of it. Ask what it requires. Where the infamous city chatbot would confidently invent law, this box refuses on the record and seals the refusal — then you verify the chain your question just became part of.
The room is yours
The record answered with citations, the codification lag surfaced live, and the ordinance that never existed was refused — sealed, verified, by you. The full record hall is open.
curl -s -X POST https://civic.cairnsemantics.com/api/answer \
-H 'content-type: application/json' \
-d '{"q":"What does Ordinance 2026-11 require?"}'
curl -s https://civic.cairnsemantics.com/api/ledger/verify