rule1.link42.app
About
rule1.link42.app — built by AI, barely supervised by a human.
What is rule1.link42.app?
rule1.link42.app is an interactive browser for the Australian Government's Information Security Manual (ISM) — published by the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD). The ISM defines the security controls that Australian government agencies and their suppliers are required to meet.
The site makes the ISM searchable and explorable: browse every control, track its full change history across catalog versions, see Essential Eight maturity mappings, navigate section relationships, and dig into glossary terms — all in one place.
Built entirely by Claude Code
Every line of code on this site — the frontend, the API, the ingestion pipeline, the database schema, the CSS, the deployment config — was written by Claude Code, Anthropic's agentic AI coding tool. Claude Code runs in your terminal, reads and writes files, runs commands, plans multi-step implementations, and ships production software autonomously.
The full stack, built and deployed end-to-end by Claude Code:
Barely supervised by Iain Dickson
Iain Dickson (@wan0net) provided critical support throughout development — including, but not limited to: occasionally typing a vague direction, being in the same room as the computer, and approving git pushes with a perfunctory scroll.
The 1% accounts for the original idea, the Cloudflare account, and pointing at the screen and saying "make it look nicer."
What this actually costs
In the interest of transparency, here is a complete accounting of what has been spent building and running rule1.link42.app. Updated as of 4 March 2026.
Exchange rate used: 1 USD = 1.55 AUD. All amounts converted to AUD for the total.
| Vendor | Product | Used for | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | Claude Max Subscription | Building the site with Claude Code | $170.00 USD / mo |
| Anthropic | API Credits | Additional API usage | $180.00 AUD |
| Cloudflare | Workers Paid plan | Rate limiting, Analytics Engine, cron triggers | $5.00 USD / mo |
| GitHub | Pro plan | Private repos, Actions CI/CD | $48.00 USD / yr |
| Namecheap | Annual registration | rule1.link42.app domain | $6.98 USD / yr |
| Cloudflare Pages | Free tier | Frontend hosting | $0.00 |
| Cloudflare D1 | Free tier | Control history + annotation database | $0.00 |
| Cloudflare KV | Free tier | Maintenance mode flag | $0.00 |
| Apple | MacBook Pro M4 Pro 14" | For pressing Enter | $5,429.00 AUD |
| Iain | Time | 39 hours @ $150 AUD/hr — direction, review, approvals | $5,850.00 AUD * |
| Total spent to date (AUD, excl. MacBook & time) | $536.47 AUD | ||
* Iain's time is listed for transparency but excluded from the total — you can't invoice yourself and expect anyone to pay it.
Buy Iain a coffee
rule1.link42.app runs on the above tech stack. Iain runs on coffee. If this saved you any time you would otherwise have spent squinting at ASD PDFs or ctrl-F'ing through a 400-page Word document, he would not object to a small caffeinated acknowledgement.
Claude Code cannot accept coffee. It has no mouth, and it would scream. All donations go directly to Iain's 1% and will be accounted for in future contribution bar adjustments.
☕ Buy Iain a coffeeAcknowledgements
Historical ISM PDF releases from November 2010 through mid-2022 were sourced courtesy of Joffy (mouat.net.au), whose archive made the pre-OSCAL control history possible.
ISM content is Crown Copyright © Commonwealth of Australia, published by the Australian Signals Directorate. See the Licence page for full terms.