How Clause5 verifies welding standards data
Clause5 publishes welding compliance values verified against the source standard, line-traced to a specific clause or table, and regression-locked against known-wrong answers. Solo-built, bootstrapped, shipped in public.
Why Clause5 exists
Welding compliance lives in PDFs. AWS D1.1:2025 alone is more than 600 pages. ASME Section IX is longer. Most working welders, inspectors, and fabricators do not own the current edition of every code their job touches. They search the web, find a forum thread from 2014 quoting a 2010 edition, and weld to a value that was revised three editions ago.
The general-purpose AI tools have made this worse, not better. A confident answer with a fake clause reference is harder to catch than a wrong answer with no reference at all. The cost of a wrong preheat number is not abstract — it is hydrogen-induced cracking in a welded joint, weeks later, in a structure already in service.
Clause5 is a compliance intelligence platform. The starting domain is welding because the source standards are public, the values are verifiable, and the failure modes are well documented. Every calculator on the site implements the table or formula from the published edition. Every reference page is anchored to a specific clause. The product is the verification, not the prose around it.
How we verify standards data
Every numeric value Clause5 publishes is verified against the source standard before it goes live. Values that cannot be confirmed in the cited edition are held back as disputed and never reach a public page.
Every claim on a reference page is line-traceable to the source standard — a specific clause, table, figure, or annex in a current published edition. An automated test fails the build if a published claim cannot be matched to its source.
Anti-fact regression tests carry a list of known-wrong values — common confusions like the 1/8-inch fillet minimum that does not exist in AWS D1.1, or clause numbers that were renumbered between editions. Anti-facts are checked on every commit. If a known-wrong value appears in published HTML, the build fails before deploy.
Schema and visible text are kept byte-equivalent. The FAQ shown on the page and the FAQ block in the JSON-LD schema are the same words. A verification script runs on every commit and exits non-zero if they drift. This matters because AI tools and search engines read from the schema, while readers read from the visible text — when those diverge, the credibility of both surfaces collapses.
What's in the library
The current library covers the structural welding family and the principal procedure-qualification codes. The covered editions are AWS D1.1:2025 (steel), D1.2:2014 (aluminum), D1.3 (sheet steel), D1.4 (reinforcing steel), D1.5:2025 (bridges), D1.6 (stainless), D1.8 (seismic supplement), D1.9 (titanium), and the AWS A2.4 symbol standard. The procedure-qualification side covers ASME Section IX, API 1104, CSA W59, AS/NZS 1554, ISO 15614, and EN 1011-2. The filler-metal series covers the AWS A5.x classifications relevant to the structural codes — A5.1, A5.5, A5.10, A5.18, A5.20, A5.28, A5.36, and A5.9. AWS QC1 covers Certified Welding Inspector qualification.
Across these standards, the site publishes around 800 reference pages, 12 interactive calculators, and a Q&A surface anchored to the same library. The reference pages are localized into 12 languages. The library is the source of truth — every published page is generated from the same verified data, so a correction in the library propagates across every surface that references the same value.
What we will and won't do
The site does not publish provisional values, draft revisions, or unpublished committee outputs. If a value is not in a current published edition, it is not on Clause5. The site does not publish paraphrased clauses without a citation back to the source — every clause-derived statement carries the clause, table, figure, or annex reference inline.
Corrections are public. When a value is found to be wrong, the fix is applied across every page that references the same value in the same commit, a regression test is added for the specific error, and the dateModified field on the affected pages is bumped. The corrected value appears in the next deploy. There is no silent edit, and there is no editorial defense of a known-wrong value.
Some questions cannot be answered from a published standard alone. Welder technique, shop-floor decisions, fitness-for-service judgments, and engineering acceptance criteria belong to the qualified inspector, the welding engineer, and the engineer-of-record. Clause5 is a research surface for what the code says — not a substitute for the people whose signatures are on the procedure or the joint.
The build philosophy
Clause5 is solo-built by Manuel, founder, and bootstrapped. There is no investor pressure shaping editorial decisions, no marketing voice padding the prose, and no internal politics about which standard ships next. The product is shipped in public — every commit, every deploy, every correction lands on the live site within minutes of being committed.
Honesty is a design constraint, not a marketing posture. The site says what it covers, what it doesn't, what's verified, and what isn't. Where a value is below a confidence threshold, it is held back rather than shipped with a hedge. The brand is the methodology — anything that compromises the verification discipline compromises the product.
How to report a discrepancy
Email flux@clause5.io with four pieces of information: the page URL where the value appears, the value as currently published, the value believed to be correct, and the source citation (edition, clause or table or figure, page number if available). Reports that include a citation are processed first because they are immediately verifiable against the source standard.
Discrepancies that affect a published number are corrected across every page that references the same value, with a regression test added in the same commit. Discrepancies that are themselves wrong (the reporter is reading an older edition, or the cited clause has been renumbered) are answered with the correct citation back to the reporter and the existing published value stands.
Frequently Asked Questions
Clause5 is built by Manuel, founder. The product, the library, and the editorial voice ship under the Clause5 brand, and every published value is verified against the source standard before it goes live. Full background is on Manuel's LinkedIn profile.
Every numeric value Clause5 publishes is verified against the source standard before it goes live. Values that cannot be confirmed are held back and never reach a public page. Every public claim is line-traceable to a specific clause, table, figure, or annex in the cited edition (for example, preheat values trace to AWS D1.1 Table 5.11). Anti-fact regression tests carry a list of known-wrong values (frequently-confused numbers, misattributed clauses) and fail the build if any of them appears in published HTML. Schema text and visible text are checked for byte-equivalence on every deploy.
Email flux@clause5.io with the page URL, the value as published, the value you believe is correct, and the source citation (edition, clause, table, page). Corrections that affect a published number are applied across every page that references the same value in the same commit, and a regression test is added for the specific error. The fix ships with a public dateModified bump. Clause5 corrects in public. There is no editorial silence on a value once a discrepancy is reported.