Method and standards · editorial

How the paper is made, and how it is held to account.

What's up with the what's up. Traced to the source. Every number on this page is either a count from the engine or labelled as a rule.

The source ladder

Every claim is walked back to the lowest rung we can reach, and the rung is printed next to it. The ladder grades evidence, never a person.

What gets published

1. Every claim links to its source. A story with no traced claim or no outbound link does not pass the gate.
2. Tense is a fact. Each claim is tagged shipped, scheduled or announced, and a claim that reads as shipped but is only announced is blocked.
3. Deep-dives only on L0. Longer pieces are written only for stories traced to a primary artifact (paper, repo, changelog).
4. Rumors are listed as rumors. An L4 item appears so you know it is circulating, labelled untraced, never promoted.
5. Quotes stay under 25 words and every summary links out. No transcripts are scraped; aggregators are used for corroboration only and never republished.
6. Nobody is graded. Creators appear as perspectives that point at a source. The reframe from calling people out to tracing claims home is deliberate and permanent.

How it is written

The engine reads 424 items from the tenant's source list each day, clusters them into stories (247 today), traces claims, and drafts the edition. The Mash angles and story deks are written by a language model running on our own server, from the traced claims only. A linter blocks template leftovers, placeholder phrases, headlines over length and any script too similar to the last fifty. A person approves every edition before it is published; nothing goes out on a timer alone. Anything spoken by a synthetic voice carries a disclosure on screen and in the first beats of the script.

Corrections

Disagree with a trace or a rung? Write to hello@the-ai-drip.com with the link and the evidence. A person re-checks within 72 hours. Corrections are issued in the next edition and recorded on the story page; the original is never silently rewritten.

What we do not publish

Income claims, unverifiable testimonials, affiliate links or sponsored placements. If any of that ever changes, it is labelled on the page it touches.

The business door

The Daily Drip is published by the same studio that sells website teardowns to local businesses. That work has its own method page. The two are kept apart: no teardown finding is ever a story, and no story is ever a sales pitch.