Specify

What it does

Organisations govern budgets, data and uptime and leave ungoverned the variable that decides adoption: how the system behaves with people. Machine dispositions are made, not found. The specification names the five character surfaces a deploying organisation controls and sets vitals for each, so that temperament becomes a written, monitored property rather than an accident of vendor defaults.

When it is used

Third. Before go-live, and re-issued whenever the underlying model or its configuration changes.

The record that supplies it

• 04
  The Character Pathway

  Stage 3 · SpecifyApplied series 1. Organisations govern budgets, data and uptime and leave ungoverned the variable that decides adoption: the system's character. The Character Specification and Character Vitals.

  2026-07-07 · Record 4 · doi:10.5281/zenodo.21249771

The worksheet itself, lifted intact from that record, is stage 3 of The Instrument Deck.

Papers that bear on it

• Same Monsters, New Casings — Applied series 2. Six recurring patterns of difficult behaviour in human teams and six in deployed machines, mapped onto each other with the same responses.
• The Endless Shift — Machine temperament as a clinical safety property: the public has converged, unprompted, on stable personality descriptions of the major models, and that convergence is data.
• The Second Pair Of Hands — Single-form omnicompetence is impossible in principle: Ashby's law of requisite variety applied to the frontier training objective, and what a second pair of hands is for.