How the elems table is built

The one-paragraph version

elems maps the ~58 permanent jobs an AI-led startup staffs — not the 1,421 tools that rotate through them. Elements earn seats through a five-part test; tools earn their tile through dated evidence; everything ships with a verification date; and when we get something wrong, the correction goes in the public changelog, not down a memory hole.

The earn-a-seat test

A category becomes an element only if it passes five checks: a distinct job no adjacent element's leaders deliver as a feature; a contested market (3+ credible vendors, or one leader plus an open standard); founder-actionable today at startup prices; durable against 18 months of frontier-model absorption (the "Jasper test"); and verifiable spend evidence. Five of five earns a numbered seat, four earns a dashed ghost tile, less stays in the pipeline. Seats are permanent: a retired element's number is never reused.

Maturity phases, gas → solid

Every element carries a phase with promotion rules attached — gas (experimental) becomes liquid (emerging) when three independent sources describe the category the same way; liquid becomes solid (stable) when a leader holds the tile two consecutive editions with revenue proof; solid becomes synthetic (commodity) when most new usage arrives bundled inside another element's leader. The phase is a decision aid: solid elements deserve five minutes of your decision budget, gas elements deserve an experiment, not a commitment.

Succession, and the rule that fired twice

Tool picks rotate only at edition bumps, only when two independent signals agree, and always in public. The one exception is the integrity/shutdown rule: a vendor that shuts down or suffers a credible integrity scandal is annotated within 72 hours and rotated immediately. It fired twice this quarter — OpenAI discontinued the Sora app (out of the Video tile) and Delve parted ways with YC over evidence-fabrication claims (out of Compliance, because compliance is the one category where a vendor's integrity failure becomes your risk).

The dossier protocol

Each element's page is built from a research dossier: pricing read from the vendor's own pricing page, every stat dated with a source (1,479 sources, 819 evidence claims across the table), disagreeing sources resolved in a visible method note rather than hidden, and the complete field tracked including the 276 tools we found dead, renamed, acquired, or sunsetting. A schema validator gates every dossier before it ships; the raw data is public at /data under CC BY 4.0.

And the money question

Rankings are never for sale — the charter is the contract, published before the first vendor dollar. Where referral links exist they're marked °, disclosed on the page, and mechanically incapable of touching a ranking: the ranking is rendered before the referral config is ever read.