🪐 Plain AI — `plainai.aguidetocloud.com`¶

Understand AI, plainly. The third true planet in the A Guide to Cloud universe.

Naming history

Plain AI was developed under the working name AI for Grandma. The audience was always: adults curious about AI but not technical. The pivot to "Plain AI" happened before launch and is final. If an agent says "AI for Grandma" → wrong. The live planet is Plain AI.

Brand positioning (locked 8 May 2026 by Sush)

Plain AI is where to learn AI in plain language — accessible to everyone. Not a museum, not an exhibit space, not a curated gallery. It's a reading site for the curious. The "museum" framing used in some early docs (from a transient design phase) is retired. Visual register stays — dark-default, gradient covers — but the positioning language is plain-English-first.

Plain AI is a static reference site for adults who keep hearing AI words and are tired of the two flavours of bad coverage — breathless hype and unhinged doom. Each topic opens with a 30-second gist. If you want more, you expand a section. Nothing is forced on you.

It is the first cosmos planet built around a content-first, prose-only product (no launcher, no dashboards, no quiz — just topic pages).

What it is, in one screen¶

Surface	What it does
`plainai.aguidetocloud.com/`	Home — gradient hero, 6-chip search, 4 reading paths, 78 topics grouped by 7 categories with gradient mesh covers
`plainai.aguidetocloud.com/<slug>`	One topic — kicker, headline, tags, 30-second gist card, "If you want more" expandables, "A real example" aside, Connected topic links, right-rail aside (`Topic NN · 78`, on-this-page TOC, back-to-category)
`plainai.aguidetocloud.com/path-<slug>`	A reading path — 5–7 hand-curated topics in order, with intro, closing takeaway, and links to other paths
`plainai.aguidetocloud.com/about`	Why this exists, what it isn't, voice rules, sources
`?tag=<tag>`	Tag-filter routing — clicking a `#scam` chip on any page deep-links to home pre-filtered

Identity¶

Element	Decision
Default mode	Dark — `#0B0D14` charcoal canvas, ivory `#F2EFE8` text. The site opens at night.
Light mode	Opt-in via `☀` toggle. No `prefers-color-scheme` auto-flip.
Accent	Cyan `#67E8F9` (dark) / `#0E7490` (light)
Gradient palette	Cyan → Purple → Pink (`#67E8F9` → `#A78BFA` → `#F472B6`), used in the wordmark "AI", the hero highlight, and 6-rotation gradient mesh covers
Type	Inter (display + body), JetBrains Mono (kickers, topic numbers, meta)
Covers	One inline SVG gradient-mesh per topic. Slug-hashed deterministic palette + shape (6 palettes × 6 shapes = 36 stable variants).
Wordmark	`[bubble gradient] Plain[gradient AI]` + strap "AI explained plainly"

This is a deliberate divergence from the warm-paper aesthetics of Earth and Shift. Side-by-side test: Earth feels like a bookshop, Shift feels like a Sunday newspaper, Plain AI feels like a calm dark reading room with bright topic covers. Same family, three distinct genres of trust.

Belief language (Plain AI's dialect)¶

Plain AI is the strictest enforcement of plain English in the cosmos. It has its own dedicated voice guardrail (~/.copilot/plain-ai-voice-guardrail.md) — read before authoring any topic content.

Forbidden words include: frontier · ecosystem · multimodal · agentic · capability shift · mass-market · vendor · robust · scalable · mission-critical · game changer · holistic · synergies · AI-powered · in layman's terms.

Voice rules:

30-second gist first. No topic opens with definitions or framing. Just: what is this, in one breath.
No fear-mongering, no hype. Tone-down rule: write like you'd explain it to a curious adult at a dinner table.
No newsletter, no signup, no ads, no analytics on the page. This is in the brand promise — see /about/.
Sources matter. Real, sourced, dated. No "AI says" — Plain AI is a reading site, not a chatbot output.
Connected topics, not algorithms. Links between plates are hand-curated, not algorithmic.

Cosmos placement¶

Plain AI is a fully cosmos-bound planet. It:

Has [cosmos] config in content/planets.json (intentionally opts out of the newsletter — Plain AI's /about/ says "no newsletter" as a brand promise; the manifest field is there for cross-planet consistency only)
Will participate in the masthead 4-icon planet rail (per cosmos-nav-playbook)
Publishes no MCP endpoint or JSON feed at launch (deferred)
Enforces cosmos law #6 — no paid content paraphrased or mentioned

Architecture, in one paragraph¶

Pure Node 18+ (no external deps for the build). Content is JSON files: content/topics/*.json (78 plates), content/paths.json (4 trails), content/categories.json (7 sections), content/pages/about.json, content/config.json. build.mjs reads JSON → writes 84 HTML pages + sitemap + robots + _headers. audit.mjs runs Playwright + axe-core (must be 0 violations + 0 tap-targets <44px before shipping). deploy.mjs uses BLAKE3 hashing via @noble/hashes to upload only the 0–N assets the CDN doesn't have, then creates the deployment via direct Cloudflare Pages REST API — wrangler is unshipped on win32-arm64. End-to-end build is ~90s. GitHub Actions runs the same flow as redundant CI deploy.

What Plain AI isn't¶

Not a tutorial site. No prompt-engineering tips, no productivity hacks.
Not a builder's reference. No model parameters, no fine-tuning recipes.
Not a news site. Topics are evergreen explainers; the corpus stabilises and gets corrected, not refreshed.
Not a paywall. Free, no signup, no email gate, no analytics on the page.

🪐 Plain AI — plainai.aguidetocloud.com¶