How Levels & Freshness Work
Two small conventions make AILmanac easy to navigate and easy to trust. Here's how to read them.
Level badges
Every page starts with a badge telling you who it's for:
- Beginner No prior knowledge assumed. Start here if you're new.
- Intermediate You've used AI a bit and want to go deeper.
- Advanced Building things — agents, the API, custom setups.
- All levels Useful at any level.
Badges rely on text, not just color, so they work for everyone (including screen readers and color-blind readers). Skip what's above your level — or stretch into it when you're ready. The Learning Paths string pages together in a sensible order per reader type.
Freshness: the "last verified" stamp
AI moves fast. Anything that changes — model names, prices, limits, UI labels, beta features — is a volatile fact, and on AILmanac those carry a stamp like this:
- Evergreen pages (concepts like "what is an LLM") don't carry a date — they don't go stale, so a date would be noise.
- Volatile pages show the date so you know how current the specifics are.
- An old date isn't a bug — it's honesty. It tells you to double-check that particular fact rather than assume.
The one hard guarantee
Model identities live in one place — the Current Models & Pricing table — kept verified and dated. No model fact is hard-coded elsewhere; everything links there. So there's a single source of truth to trust.
Why this matters
A guide that's confidently out of date is worse than no guide. These conventions let us be complete without pretending nothing changes — and let you calibrate how much to trust any given line.