How Levels & Freshness Work
Two small conventions make AILmanac easy to navigate and easy to trust. Master them once, and every page becomes faster to read and easier to rely on.
- Read the four level badges and know which pages are written for you
- Spot a freshness stamp and interpret an old date correctly
- Tell evergreen pages from volatile ones at a glance
- Know where every model fact lives — the single source of truth
Convention 1: level badges
Every page starts with a badge telling you who it's for. Here are all four, exactly as they appear:
- 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.
- Want the pages strung together in a sensible order for your reader type? Follow a Learning Path.
The Learning Paths string pages together in a sensible order per reader type.
Convention 2: the freshness 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:
How to read what you see:
- 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.
- When the date looks old, don't treat the specific number or label as gospel — open the linked official source and confirm. The source always wins over the page.
How to use both conventions on any page
- Glance at the badge under the title. If it's above your level, skip it for now or stretch in when ready; if it matches you, dive in.
- No stamp means the page is evergreen and won't go stale. A stamp means the page carries volatile facts.
- A recent date means the specifics are current. An old date is a signal to verify, not a sign the page is broken.
- For anything you'll act on — a price, a limit, a model name — open the official source linked in the stamp. It always wins.
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.
Check yourself
0/3- Four badges (beginner, intermediate, advanced, all) tell you who a page is for — and they use text, not just color.
- Volatile facts carry a 'last verified' date plus an official source link that always wins; evergreen pages carry no date.
- An old date is honesty, not a bug — verify, don't assume.
- All model identities live in one verified, dated source of truth: the Current Models & Pricing table.