The rooms next door

Next door: the Legal Memory Workbench

The gap, drawn

Three things have to meet for a relevance read-through to work: your side of the table, the law's side, and something that carries meaning between them. Today those three live in different states of readiness.

Grounded here means the design requires answers drawn only from retrieved sections of real law, each one cited to act and section. The limits page explains why that bar is non-negotiable.

One prompt for the crossing

The method holds the full ladder of prompts. This one is the specific join between the workbench's output and the registers, for the day you come back from next door with files in hand.

I am running a relevance read-through of Australian law, following a published method. Attached are markdown files from the Legal Memory Workbench describing my life, work, projects, property and obligations.

Task 1: from these files, list the jurisdictions whose law is likely to touch me: the Commonwealth, my state or territory, and my local council.

Task 2: for each area of my life in the files, name the acts most likely to be relevant, with the official register where I can read each one (legislation.gov.au for Commonwealth law, my state or territory's own legislation site for state law).

Task 3: list what you are unsure about, as questions back to me, including any evidence gaps: documents I should hold but have not described.

Rules: use only official government legislation websites as sources. For every claim about what the law says, cite the act name and section, and state the currency date of the version you read. This is legal information for my own reading, not legal advice, and I will verify citations against the register before relying on anything.

Whatever the assistant answers, the citations are the product. Check them at the register before you act on them; where a decision matters, a qualified lawyer.

The wider shelf

The workbench is the nearest neighbour, but not the only one. These rooms share a builder and a habit: plain tools, published open, that people can use without asking permission. One line each.

All six links open the live sites. This site's licence explains the terms the shelf is published under.

The shelf has one shared habit. None of these rooms asks anyone to tear anything down. Each one puts a tool on the bench, in the open, and lets people pick it up.

A route through the rooms

If you have just arrived and want to actually run a relevance read-through, rather than only read about one, this order works.

1. See what a full read-through looks like

   Start on the home page for the 2013 story, then open the filing cabinet to see the 61 documents one cabinet actually holds.

2. Learn the method

   The method gives you the Relevance Ladder and the copy-paste prompts. This is the bridge you will be walking.

3. Map your side, next door

   Open the Legal Memory Workbench and work through it. Come back with markdown files describing your life, work, property and obligations.

4. Find the law's side

   Nine registers links every official register, from the Federal Register of Legislation down to your council's local laws. Your relevance helps you pick which acts matter for someone in your shoes.

5. Run the bridge

   Bring your files and the official sources to a general AI assistant, using the method's prompts. Then take the results to the sorting bench, and anything worth changing to change the law.

6. Calibrate your trust

   Before acting on anything an assistant tells you about law, read the limits page. Grounding and citations are non-negotiable; an unverified answer is a claim you cannot check.

Words used on this page

Static site

A website made of plain files sent straight to your browser, with no program running on a server behind it. Nothing to log into, nothing watching, nothing stored about you.

Markdown

A plain-text file format that uses simple marks (like # for a heading) instead of hidden formatting. Any text editor can open it, and most AI assistants read it cleanly.

Register

The official website where a parliament publishes its law. Australia has nine: one Commonwealth, six state, two territory. The nine registers room links them all.

Evidence gap

A document you would want in hand but do not yet hold: a lease you never kept a copy of, a super statement, a contract signed years ago. The workbench helps you list these so you can go and get them.

Grounded

An answer built only from retrieved passages of the real source text, with each claim cited back to it, rather than from a model's general recollection. The engine design treats this as the entry price for trust.