The CODES test: five questions any platform can fail.
Run it on any platform before you put a client’s business on it. Five questions, each with a yes or a no, and a rule with no partial credit.
A feature list is a snapshot. A test is a forecast.
Every platform can show you a feature list, and every feature list is true on the day you read it. It says nothing about the day a client asks for the thing that isn’t on it. That is the day you find out what you built on.
The CODES test asks five questions instead. Each has a yes or a no. Each is about a decision you will need to make later — change the behaviour, leave, keep the records, add something new, grow — and whether the platform lets you make it. Feature lists are written by the vendor. The answers to these questions are written into the terms, the export and the settings panel, where you can read them yourself.
The rule is strict on purpose. Four passes and one fail is a fail, because the one you failed is the one the client will eventually need.
There is no partial credit. Four out of five is a fail.
Five tests. Any platform. Pass or fail.
A feature list tells you what a platform does today. These five questions tell you what it will let you do later, when a client asks for something it wasn’t built for. Ask them of any platform, including the one your clients are on now.
Can you change how the system behaves, or only what the settings panel exposes?
Not just “can you leave,” but can someone change the deal while you stay?
Do your records live in your database or someone else’s?
Add what isn’t there yet, without waiting on a roadmap.
Does it have a ceiling you’ll hit?
How a folder of files answers each one.
Here is how the playbook’s stack — static builds on hosting you chose — scores, including the two letters where the honest answer needs a sentence more.
Behaviour is whatever the build produces. The build is the panel, and you wrote it.
Nobody can change the deal while you stay, because there is no deal: the host is replaceable in an afternoon.
Data
Partial by default, full by choice. Static pages have no database, so the question moves to the form endpoint, and this site’s form posts to a route it owns.
What isn’t there yet is a file you haven’t written. The governed agent is the proof: an AI feature no platform sells.
Passes for content and marketing sites, which is what the playbook is scoped to. A store or a login is a different stack, and the playbook says so.
A test you run on behalf of clients.
The test is not a private opinion about platforms. It is a professional artifact. A freelancer who can say “I run every platform through five tests before I put your business on it” has said something a client can repeat to a partner, and something a competitor has to answer.
Run it on the platform the client is on now, write the five answers down, one line each, and show them. Nothing in the test requires the client to understand a build, only a yes and a no. Clients recognise a fail when they have already paid for one.
The test also runs on AI features, which every platform now sells. Whose model, whose rules, whose logs: that is Control, Ownership and Data again, asked of a chatbot instead of a settings panel. The governed agent is the answer, and it has its own page.
Passing is table stakes. Running it is the playbook.
A folder of static files on hosting you chose passes all five without trying. That is not the achievement. The achievement is running an owned stack for ten clients so that nothing bad ever ships: no banned phrase, no dead link, no claim nobody can source, no third-party request quietly added on a Tuesday. That is a discipline, not a platform, and it has six parts.
Passing is the easy part. Running it so nothing bad ships — that’s the playbook.
Read the sharpest chapter first. It costs an email.
We’ll send the build-gate chapter in full: the checks, the code, and the reasoning. Read it. If it doesn’t change how you think about shipping client sites, you’ve lost ten minutes and kept a working release gate.
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