A Life in the UK

Review material. This is exploratory research, not an authoritative service or released data product.

Claude journey-walker consumer evaluation — 13 August 2026

Result

The test is useful evidence that a general-purpose AI can hydrate the public OKF descriptor, recover the population shape and rapidly make a portable journey-discovery prototype. It is not evidence that the generated product fully understood the governed bundle or is safe to offer as citizen guidance.

The output preserved the important high-level boundary that it was a discovery aid rather than an official service. It also demonstrated a promising interaction pattern. However, it discarded semantic and assurance fields that are needed to interpret journeys correctly. The resulting errors are material: review status was overstated, exception routes were often presented first, related families were described as ordered steps, and jurisdiction was inferred from labels and host names.

This evaluation therefore treats the supplied result as a consumer case study, not as a publication artefact. Its useful interaction pattern informs the additive Explore OKF reference product under /explore/. The tested public okf-explorer.json descriptor remains the canonical entrypoint and is not replaced or rewritten by that work.

Test and evidence boundary

The supplied task asked Claude to use the verified public okf-explorer.json descriptor, assess what it contained and produce a standalone HTML journey walker. The exact model version, model settings, tool transcript and fetched source bytes were not recorded. The test cannot therefore be reproduced as a controlled model benchmark.

The two user-supplied files were inspected locally. They have not been copied into this repository because they are private raw evaluation material. Their identities are recorded so that the exact inputs can be recognised without redistributing them.

Supplied evidence Bytes Lines SHA-256 Repository retention
okf-journey-walker.html 2,107,344 457 7457f5b035276888e6115c8522847393b1207461633d7b95c5d274f5ebac6179 Digest and findings only
Claude task transcript, supplied as pasted-text.txt 13,214 101 bedc34a495bf460318299aa48a8576bad54fa8fcdc78f4fe7cc3273d370dcdbc Digest and findings only

The digests identify the supplied bytes. They do not prove authorship, correctness or the model configuration used to create them.

Which bundle Claude found

There is not a second, hidden monolithic “full bundle”. The 2,898-byte public okf-explorer.json file is a descriptor: it points to the sharded publication containing 9,757 records and 15,810 governed relationships. Claude followed those entrypoints and distilled the journey fields it selected into the 2,107,344-byte standalone HTML file.

The separate 1,920,910-byte okf-bundle.json contains 392 Markdown nodes and 318 authored-link edges. It is the compact OKF and legacy-viewer compatibility bundle, not the richer semantic population that Claude used. Explore OKF should therefore remain a new consumer of the descriptor-backed publication, with a small governed projection of its own. It should not replace either existing entrypoint or require clients to download the whole published tree.

What worked

These are strong signs of machine readability and rapid prototyping value. They do not establish semantic fidelity, security, accessibility or citizen readiness.

Material findings

Finding Supplied result Governed interpretation and correction
Specialist review The footer described two families as specialist-reviewed. The review report records zero named specialist acceptances, 291 families requiring specialist review and two for which it is not required. Population-complete does not mean specialist-reviewed or release-grade.
Episode order Exception routes appear first for 145 families; ordinary routes appear first for 148. The extraction discarded the authored episode_kind and order. The ordinary route must be identified explicitly and shown separately from exceptions.
Related families Families sharing an enclosing process were presented as other steps in a journey. They are related families within the same process. The graph does not assert that they form one cross-family sequence.
Journey inference The analysis inferred cross-family chains and likely bottlenecks. follows and precedes order steps inside an authored episode. They do not justify an invented cross-family route or operational bottleneck.
Jurisdiction Nation filtering used label substrings; source jurisdiction was inferred from host names. Jurisdiction and source applicability must come from explicit authored fields. Great Britain, United Kingdom, England and Wales and local applicability cannot be reduced safely to a nation-name substring or a GOV.UK host.
Filter state Changing nation after selecting a dossier could leave a result selected without safely rerendering it. Filter state and selected-record state must be reconciled deterministically.
Search Search used a reduced text index and omitted authored aliases. The governed aliases must be searchable. Representative acceptance terms include missed bin and find NHS dentist.
Provenance The embedded family objects omitted bundle identity, stable IRIs, relationship assertion IDs, authority, evidence, rights, observation time and review status. A reference projection must preserve the minimum evidence-bearing semantic fields and bind itself to an exact source snapshot.
Standalone security The file made no runtime request or persistent write, but it had no content security policy, declared lang="en", and used HTML-string insertion and inline event-handler patterns. A publishable file needs en-GB, a restrictive content security policy, safe DOM construction, validated HTTPS links and no unsafe inline execution. Offline behaviour alone does not remove injection or integrity risk.

Effectiveness assessment

Dimension Assessment
Finding and loading the corpus Strong
Recovering headline structure Strong
Preserving governed semantics Mixed
Provenance and auditability Weak
Rapid interaction prototyping Strong
Secure, accessible standalone delivery Not demonstrated
Citizen-facing readiness Not suitable

The most useful conclusion is that OKF enabled a capable consumer to get from a small public entrypoint to a rich working prototype quickly. The principal gap is not access to more data. It is a smaller, governed consumer projection that makes the correct interpretation difficult to lose.

Corrected Explore OKF reference product

The lean next move has been implemented locally as an additive /explore/index.html standalone view and root explore-okf.json descriptor, generated from the same authored source as the existing publication. The sidecar also publishes the exact /explore/journey-projection.json, /explore/endpoint-labels.json and /explore/data-manifest.json inputs used by the standalone view. These files must not change the already tested okf-explorer.json descriptor or the existing Explorer routes.

The sidecar provides:

“Reference product” means a conforming interpretation of the governed bundle. It is not a claim that an AI or interface has human-like understanding. The local sidecar is not a public product until its exact deployed URL passes the repository's real-browser identity and journey checks.

Acceptance and next evaluation

The reference projection and standalone view pass local deterministic checks covering:

The controlled follow-up recorded model settings, bundle snapshot, publication closure, prompt, output schema, question sources and private raw output. Two no-retry attempts remained incomplete, and independent review was not fabricated. The current offline evaluator does not yet bind each supplied answer to its matching immutable runner receipt, so this public case study does not report response counts, scores, behavioural results or a model comparison from those private attempts. The attempts identified areas for further harness investigation, including contract compliance, timeouts, family selection, evidence and receipt binding.

All 104 questions were used while diagnosing the harness. They are therefore development-calibration evidence, not an untouched performance set. A later ablation must compare direct publication access with projection-assisted access before making a causal claim, and any performance claim needs a newly frozen held-out question set. The offline pack at evaluation/ai-consumer/README.md defines these boundaries without retaining model prose in its aggregate report.