method candidate goes to: this-edition E explorer
Three honest tiers for a model on a site with no server: a local matcher, your own key, or a vault bridge
A static site has no server, no session and no place to keep a secret, so the usual chat box (a backend holding the API key) is not an option. The honest choices are three: a deterministic matcher in the browser that is free, private, works offline and shows which words it matched on (the default, because a reader should never have to hold a credential to use an index); the reader's own key, opt-in and labelled, which lives in the page's origin and is a trust decision presented as one; and a vault bridge where the host holds the key below the permission floor and the app never sees it. When the model call fails, fall back to the first tier and say so.
Decided by. Nobody yet: a candidate for Dinis to read, comment on and decide (keep, rewrite, merge, cut, article first, later, not doing it).
Note. Dated 27 August 2026, with an addendum of 7 September: the pane on every page was given seven tools over the site's own index, and shows every call it made. The bridge's own qualification travels with it, quoted: 'The bridge protects your key; it is not yet a boundary that prevents all egress.' Only the first tier is free; the third was not built (on the board as T11).
Where it comes from
- A chat box on a site with no server, the plan, and the trade it makes The constraint nobody can design around; The three tiers (newsroom)
What it answers in the 2018 book
- none named
Where it goes
Chapter Ship a serverless product in a weekend, part Hands on, 2026 (drafting); topic Building blocks: cloud, serverless, free models, git and CI.
Other ideas proposed for the same chapter: Scope the feature to one question, and quote rather than paraphrase, Billing by not building billing: the commercial model is a property of the key, Twice now the product was possible and the licence was the blocker: read the terms, not only the docs, VoiceDebrief: a product with no server that shipped in three weeks and stopped at the one thing it could not sell, A read-only vault needs no code; a read-write vault server is 83 lines on a free plan.
Node idea:three-tiers-for-a-model-on-a-static-site in graph.json; see it in the graph. Source: admin/content/graph/ideas.json.