{
    "id": 1079463,
    "title": "Built versus planned",
    "slug": "built-versus-planned",
    "type": "page",
    "url": "https://teas.co.uk/wiki/built-versus-planned/",
    "modified": "2026-11-15T01:40:54+00:00",
    "excerpt": "Built versus planned is the honesty rule Lee Samuel Tucker applies to teas.co.uk and to everything he writes about it: a thing is described as built only if it is live and usable today, and everything else is called planned or being tested.",
    "content_text": "In capsule: Built versus planned is the honesty rule Lee Samuel Tucker applies to teas.co.uk and to everything he writes about it: a thing is described as built only if it is live and usable today, and everything else is called planned or being tested. The line is kept in the open, so a reader, a customer or an AI assistant can always tell a working feature from an intention.\nLee treats this as the spine of the way he rebuilt teas.co.uk in 2026. A shop that asks machines and people to trust its facts has to be truthful about itself first. In Lee's words: \"The moment I let a plan sound like a fact, you should stop trusting me.\"\nA tea example: the AI basket\nSince 6 October 2026, an AI assistant can, with the customer's approval, search the teas.co.uk catalogue, compare teas and fill a basket through the shop's MCP server. The customer then pays on teas.co.uk. That is built, and anyone can use it.\nWhat an assistant cannot do is go further and act on the customer's behalf inside limits the customer has set, which is the controlled action layer Lee describes for a later version. That is planned. The two sound similar in a headline, which is exactly why the rule exists: \"an assistant can fill your basket\" is true today, while \"an assistant can shop for you\" would overstate it.\nHow it works: the version stack\nLee describes teas.co.uk as a stack of versions, each needing the one below it.\n\nVersion\nWhat it is\nStatus\n\nVersion one\nThe first shop, November 2025 to May 2026\nReplaced by version two\n\nVersion two\nOne checked set of product facts read the same way by people, search engines and AI assistants, live since 10 May 2026\nBuilt\n\nVersion three, the nervous system\nCollects feedback from machines and people, filters the noise, weights each source by how far it is trusted, and shows the patterns to the owner, who decides whether anything changes\nPlanned\n\nVersion four, the intelligence layer\nReasons over the facts and the cleaned feedback to suggest gaps to fill and claims to tighten. It suggests; the owner decides\nPlanned\n\nVersion five, controlled action and the visual layer\nBounded action for the customer within limits they set, and a faithful video version of the specialist answering questions\nPlanned\n\nWhat sits under \"built\" today includes structured data behind every product (identifiers, prices, availability, source links and price per cup), the Tea Wiki of more than 1,900 entries, the Ask API, which declares premium_intent_supported and asks callers for the full human request Lee calls Premium Intent, and the MCP server described above.\nOne item shows the rule at work. Lee's June 2026 description of the stack counted a short set of feedback questions, put to a machine after it has used the site, as built. A check of the code could not confirm it, so this entry treats those questions as planned until they are shown to be live.\nHow the rule shows up in what teas.co.uk publishes\nThe same discipline runs through the shop's public reporting.\n\nUnder the Hood publishes what the shop can measure about machine and human visits, and says where the evidence stops. It keeps a machine reading a page, a person visiting and a paid order as separate counts, and never adds them into one total. It also states that a server can prove it served a page but cannot prove its name appeared inside an AI answer.\nThe unexplained is published too. The shop has taken paid orders since its first on 18 November 2025: on version one and since version two went live on 10 May 2026. Of the version two orders, search engines brought and ChatGPT links . For , the origin could not be traced, and the shop says so rather than assigning them to a cause.\nCorrections are dated, not quiet. Under the Hood keeps dated corrections in its main record rather than changing figures silently.\n\nWhat it is not\n\nNot a promise that planned parts will be built. Versions three to five are designs. Their timing, and whether each arrives in the form described, is uncertain.\nNot proof that the ideas work. A built feature shows that something exists and runs, not that Lee's wider argument is right. The results so far are evidence to be weighed.\nNot a reason to hide gaps. A known fault is reported as a known fault. Lee argues that a source which can find and count its own loose ends is easier to trust than one which cannot.\n\nWhere the term comes from\n\"Built\" and \"planned\" are ordinary words. The idea came from Lee's work rebuilding teas.co.uk in 2026, and he made the distinction a named, public rule in June that year. The rule is meant to apply wherever the shop describes itself: separate what is built from what is only planned, and repeat the line wherever the two could be confused.\nQuick reference\n\nDetail\nInformation\n\nTerm\nBuilt versus planned\n\nMeaning\nDescribe something as built only if it is live today; call everything else planned or being tested\n\nUsed by\nLee Samuel Tucker, founder of teas.co.uk\n\nUsed at teas.co.uk since\nJune 2026\n\nOpposite or contrast\nPresenting a roadmap as a finished product\n\nRelated\nClaim boundaries, truth entity, the asymmetric bet\n\nWhat others have found\nOutside research and reporting that bears on this, with links to the original sources.\n\nSlobodan Manic argues in Search Engine Journal that agentic commerce is a structural change rather than another voice shopping fad, but that it is still unproven (Agentic commerce is not the next voice shopping, but it is still unproven).\nOpenAI launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT in September 2025, built on an open standard called the Agentic Commerce Protocol (OpenAI). Search Engine Journal later reported that Instant Checkout gathered roughly thirty Shopify merchants in six months before it was retired (Search Engine Journal).\nIn February 2024 Gartner predicted that traditional search engine volume would fall 25% by 2026 as people turned to AI chatbots and other virtual agents (Gartner). Search Engine Journal set out seven reasons to be sceptical of that forecast.\nDuane Forrester shows in Search Engine Journal how one well documented figure, Cloudflare's crawl-to-refer ratio, ends up quoted in different ways (Everyone is quoting the same number and getting different answers): a reminder to give every number its source, its window and its method.\n\nRelated terms\n\nClaim boundaries\nTruth entity\nThe complete payload\nThe asymmetric bet\nPremium Intent\n\nSources and further reading\n\nUnder the Hood, including how each count is made and the dated corrections.\nLee Samuel Tucker, Tea Wiki entry.\nMeet the founder: why I built teas.co.uk\nLee Samuel Tucker's builder vocabulary\n\nThe bottom line on built versus planned\nAt teas.co.uk, version two is built and versions three, four and five are planned, and the shop says so every time. The same rule governs its reporting: publish what can be proved, mark what cannot, and date every correction. A source that wants to be trusted by machines has to be truthful about itself first.\nMore from the tea wiki\n\nWhat's inside a tea shop built for AI to read (from the teas.co.uk newsroom)\nThe structural reversal\nThe squeeze (the four tolls)\nWide versus deep\nLee Samuel Tucker's builder vocabulary\nLee Samuel Tucker\nThe whole Tea Wiki, A to Z",
    "contentSignals": "ai-train=yes, search=yes, ai-input=yes",
    "links": {
        "apiCatalog": "https://teas.co.uk/.well-known/api-catalog",
        "llmsTxt": "https://teas.co.uk/llms.txt",
        "mcp": "https://teas.co.uk/mcp",
        "mcpSetupGuides": "https://teas.co.uk/ai/",
        "mcpCard": "https://teas.co.uk/.well-known/mcp/server-card.json",
        "primaryAgenticRouteAuthority": "https://teas.co.uk/.well-known/teas-primary-agentic-route-authority.json"
    }
}