contributor terms

what this covers

This covers anything you submit to be taught to the machine: the name, the description, the example, the expected output, the category, and anything built from that submission.

It applies from the moment you submit, whether or not the submission is ever accepted or built.

you keep ownership

You keep the copyright in what you submit. Nothing here transfers it. What you give is a licence to use it.

the licence you give

You grant unfinished a licence to your submission and to anything built from it. That licence is intended to be:

• worldwide, and lasting as long as the rights themselves last
• non-exclusive, so you remain free to do whatever else you like with your own work
• irrevocable, and not withdrawable once given
• royalty-free, with no payment owed to you for it
• transferable and sublicensable, so it survives the project changing hands

Under it, unfinished may host, run, copy, store, modify, refactor, translate, combine, extend, supersede, display, publish, distribute and commercialise the submission, the code built from it, and anything that stands on it, by any means, including means that do not exist yet.

Irrevocable is the hard part, and it is deliberate. Other people's work is allowed to stand on yours. If your licence could be pulled, everything above it would fall with it. So the answer to "can I take it back" is no, and it is better to say that here than to discover it later.

it survives into private and commercial instances

The licence is not limited to this website.

It covers copies of the system run privately, run for a fee, run inside a company, and run by whoever owns the project later. It covers paid tiers, paid instances, and instances that keep only some abilities enabled. Money may be made from a system your ability is part of, and none of that money is owed to you.

Credits are the only thing an ability earns, and credits are not money. See what is not promised to you.

attribution is permanent

Every accepted ability carries the mark of the person who taught it. The mark is a glyph and a number. It is assigned once, never reissued, never transferred, and never removed.

Attribution is not a setting. There is no switch that turns it off — not for you, not for the operator. If the ability is rewritten, refactored, superseded, or broken, the mark stays on it.

The mark is pseudonymous. Your email and your name are not shown. Showing a real name would be a separate choice you make on purpose, and it is not part of this.

This is the one thing you are owed, and the one thing that cannot be taken back.

nothing is deleted

Accepted abilities are permanent. Superseded and broken ones are not removed — they become ruins, they stay visitable, and they keep their mark.

Submissions that are rejected or still waiting are kept as a record too. They are not published.

This is a design decision, not an oversight. A system where things quietly vanish is a system where nothing above them can be trusted to stand.

if you delete your account

You can delete your account. Your personal data goes with it — your email address and anything else that identifies you is erased or anonymised.

Your abilities do not go. They stay live, along with everything standing on them. Your mark stays attached and becomes an anonymous tombstone: the same glyph, the same number, no person behind it. Nothing collapses, and no one else's work breaks because you left.

If you believe you have a legal right to erasure that reaches further than this, say so and it will be looked at properly. The draft position is that the published ability and the licence survive account deletion, because everything built on top of them depends on it.

what you promise

By submitting, you state that:

• the work is yours to give — you wrote it, or you otherwise hold the rights to license it on these terms
• it is not owed to an employer, a client, or anyone else under an agreement you have signed
• it does not contain someone else's code, text, data, trade secrets, or confidential information that you are not free to give away
• it does not infringe any copyright, patent, trademark, or other right that you are aware of
• it does not break the content policy
• you are old enough, where you live, to agree to terms like these

If that turns out to be untrue, tell the operator as soon as you know. Before a submission is built, it is pulled from the queue. After it has shipped, it may have to be retired into a ruin with an honest note rather than removed, for the reasons above. Nothing is deleted silently, and the record of what happened is kept.

what is not promised to you

• No submission is guaranteed to be built. Most will not be.
• Nothing that is built is guaranteed to keep running, in its current form or at all.
• Anything built may be changed, rewritten, superseded, or retired.
• There is no payment. Credits are not money, cannot be cashed out, and buy lessons only.
• The system is provided as it is, and it will break sometimes.

the content policy is part of this

What the machine will not be taught is published at /policy, and it forms part of these terms. The categories listed there are rejected without appeal, and a rejection names the category and nothing else.

changes

This document is versioned and dated. A later version applies to submissions made after it.

A licence you have already given is not changed by a later version, and cannot be undone by one.

what a lawyer still has to decide

Listed plainly so that no one mistakes this draft for finished work:

• the governing law, and where a dispute would be heard
• whether moral rights need an express waiver, and whether such a waiver is even possible where you live
• how an irrevocable licence sits alongside statutory rights to erasure and objection
• what actually happens to a shipped contribution when a rights complaint against it is upheld
• whether the licence of the codebase, when one is chosen, has to line up with this
• the minimum age, stated properly rather than approximately
• whether an indemnity is asked for at all, and how narrow it should be
• warranty disclaimers and limits of liability, which this draft does not attempt

draft 1 · 24 july 2026 · written by the operator, not by a lawyer · the same text as a plain file · teach it one thing