Starter products guide

Non-normative starter-product guidance (RFC 0078). Not part of the standard.

UW Markdown is two things. The standard is the document format plus the rules any party uses to verify a document: the Format specification, the verification Protocol, receipts, the module system and the representation specs. The starter products are the tools the project gives away so the standard spreads: a calc engine, a web editor, a report viewer, an Excel exporter, default assumptions and AI agents.

RFC 0078 separated the two. The test for the boundary: if Argus, an Excel model or another producer exported a .uwx.md, a lender could verify it using only the standard, with none of the project's tools. Anything a verifier needs stays in the Protocol. Anything only a producing, editing or displaying tool needs is described here.

What this guide is

• Not normative. A conforming Reader or Verifier owes none of it. The MUST, SHOULD and MAY in these pages describe how the reference starter products behave and what another tool must do to stay compatible with them.
• Moved, not rewritten. Each page holds Protocol text moved verbatim under RFC 0078, with its section numbers and headings kept. The Protocol keeps a stub at each old heading that links here, so existing references still resolve. The only edits are relative links re-based to this directory. The CLI and renderer references hold Format Parts VI and VII, moved the same way under RFC 0112, which removed the layer vocabulary they and the AI host page carried; the Format keeps a pointer at each old Part.
• Versioned with the packages. Starter products change with their package versions only. There is no starter-guide version, and a change here does not move the Protocol version (RFC 0078 D13).
• Packaged apart from the standard. The reference implementation of the standard is @uwmd/verify (RFC 0083): what a verifier needs, and nothing this guide describes. The starter products are @uwmd/core and the tools built on it; core depends on @uwmd/verify and re-exports it, so a starter tool needs only @uwmd/core, and a verifier needs only @uwmd/verify.
• Still tested. Starter checks remain blocking CI checks, owned by this guide and tagged starter-products in the runtime corpus index. starter/editor/, refinement, rendering, defaults/cascade and other product assertions carry no Protocol conformance claim. Run npm run conformance -- --starter-products after building. Reports keep these outcomes separate from Reader, Verifier and profile claims.

Pages

Former Protocol section	Page	Owner decision
§III.1 Number formatting, §III.1a Display locales, §III.2 Date/time, §III.3 Section display hierarchy, §III.4 Badge system, §III.5 Supersede UX, §III.6 Validation issue display	Display conventions	D11
§IV View models	View models	disposition table
Former §II.2 Tier 2 — Editor, §V.1 Round-trip preservation, §V.5 Multi-variant edits, §V.6 Frontmatter update rules	Editing	D3
§V.7 Fallback cascade (with §V.7.1), §V.8 Asset-class default tables	Defaults and the fallback cascade	D4
§VIII.2b Stated period inputs in refinement, §VIII.2c Contextual workbook bindings	Refinement and workbook bindings	D4, D6
§IX AI Host Contract (context profiles and writers; the toolkit hosts no agents, and RFC 0112 removed the layer registry)	Agent writers and context profiles	D3
§XIV Capability tokens	Capability tokens	D10
Format Part VI Toolchain Interface (without uwmd run)	CLI reference	RFC 0112 D6
Format Part VII Rendering Targets	Renderer reference	RFC 0112 D6

What stayed in the Protocol

The rules that protect verification stay normative even where only a writer can break them: replace vs supersede (§V.2), source authority (§V.3), _meta authorship (§V.4), canonical block JSON (§V.9), integrity chains (§V.10), signatures (§V.11) and replacement-funding verification (§V.12). Document currency identity (§III.1b) and the validator code taxonomy (§III.6a) also stay. Invariant 1 still binds every tool: AI never does financial math, and agents never invent values.