Time Assurance Documentation Scanner

Open-source, AI-assisted documentation scanner (tads) that supports long-horizon time assurance by identifying potential defects, implicit assumptions, missing evidence, and related inconsistencies in standards and technical documentation.

"Assurance" here means systematically identifying and documenting potential time-related risks and evidence for human review. TADS contributes to that process; it does not guarantee that all such issues have been found, and it cannot prove a document, protocol, implementation, or system free of long-horizon time defects.

This repository contains the open-source scanner engine and CLI. It is the documentation-scanning sibling of time_assurance_code_scanner (tacs).

New here? Follow QUICK_START.md — install through a first scan in about 15 minutes (offline mock path, then optional real LLM).

Status

Stable release (package 0.6.0) with Phase 2 corpus support: Tier-1 adapters for IETF, ETSI, and 3GPP; a generic analysis profile for unidentified plan / scan documents; remote fetch for W3C, ECMA, OASIS, and NIST; local-file stubs for ITU-T, IEEE, and ISO/IEC. The everyday workflow is fetch → plan → scan → human review → render. See CHANGELOG.md for changes since 0.5.1.

Default LLM: Ollama Cloud (gpt-oss:120b when OLLAMA_HOST is unset). BYOLLM also supports local Ollama, OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and an offline mock provider.

Privacy (read this)

Processing is ephemeral by default: the tool does not keep a private document store. That does not mean “never leaves your machine.”

• Document text is sent to the LLM provider you configure (Ollama Cloud, OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or your local Ollama daemon).
• Reports are written only where you ask (outputs/ by default). Prefer mock or local Ollama for sensitive drafts.

Details: docs/privacy.md.

Principles

• Open source first; model-independent (BYOLLM)
• Corpus-aware, not keyword-driven
• Evidence-based; deterministic checks where possible
• Human review is authoritative — scan outputs are candidates for review (validated finding = human disposition=accepted only)
• Extensible beyond Y203x without redesign

Limitations

TADS is an AI-assisted review aid, not an authoritative standards or compliance oracle.

TADS is not a completeness checker. A clean scan does not establish that a document is free of Y2036, Y2038, Y2106, or other long-horizon time risks or assurance gaps. Detection depends on the current taxonomy, extracted content, corpus parsing, analysis coverage and caps, prompt framework, and the selected model and provider.

In TADS reports, assurance status describes the evidence and review state of an individual candidate. It is not an assurance rating or safety verdict for the analyzed document, protocol, implementation, or system. Outputs begin as candidates for review, not confirmed defects.

• Document content is untrusted and may try to influence the model. TADS separates scanner policy from document data where provider APIs permit. Official OpenAI and Gemini endpoints may also receive a provider-native JSON schema as a reliability aid, not a security boundary; TADS still validates locally. Custom OpenAI-compatible base URLs stay on the prompt-only path. Structured validation and tests reduce risk; they do not eliminate prompt injection.
• A schema-valid report can still contain incomplete, misleading, or fabricated analysis. A clean report is not proof that the document did not influence the model, and it is not a time-safety verdict.
• False positives and false negatives are expected.
• Scope labels (core / supporting / incidental / out_of_scope) are advisory.
• Absence claims (“not addressed / no guidance”) can still be wrong.
• Results vary by model, provider, prompt framework, and analysis caps.
• Sensitive documents should use an appropriately trusted provider or a local model.
• PDF and HTML extraction may be incomplete, as may treatment of tables, figures, annexes, and referenced material.
• No findings ≠ “no time-assurance risk.”
• Experts should review severity and remediation before relying on results or submitting comments to a standards body.

Quick start

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate   # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"
# Optional PDF conversion (PyMuPDF): pip install -e ".[pdf]"

# Offline plumbing (no API key) — fetch needs network once:
tads fetch RFC5905
tads scan inputs/RFC5905.txt --doc-id RFC5905 --provider mock \
  --max-sections 2 --force-sections --overwrite -y

Then open outputs/RFC5905.md. For a real LLM scan and provider .env setup, use QUICK_START.md.

Default install covers plain text, HTML, and .docx. PDF conversion needs the optional [pdf] extra (third-party PyMuPDF; see License).

Reading reports: Markdown shows primary candidates for review; JSON is canonical (all candidates, dispositions, evidence, provenance). Edit dispositions in JSON, then tads render outputs/RFC5905.json -f.

--save-raw-on-error is off by default. If you enable it, TADS may write a .raw.txt troubleshooting file beside the JSON report. That file can contain complete model output and document excerpts, is capped at 256 KiB, is sensitive as a whole, and is not field-sanitized. Use it only for debugging parse failures.

Docs

Start here: QUICK_START.md

Historical / design (optional): docs/phase0.md (completed Phase 0 record), docs/fetch_tier2_plan.md (completed Tier-2 fetch plan), docs/candidate_kind.md (design note, not implemented), docs/rfc5905_provider_compare.md (bake-off notes), eval/corpus/README.md (bootstrap eval labels), scripts/README.md (optional 12-doc bench harness).

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for development setup and PR expectations. To report a vulnerability, use SECURITY.md (not a public issue).

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Copyright (c) 2026 Y2038.com LLC

Optional PDF support (pip install "time-assurance-doc-scanner[pdf]") pulls in PyMuPDF, which is dual-licensed under AGPL-3.0 or an Artifex commercial license. Review PyMuPDF/Artifex terms if you enable that extra. TADS itself remains Apache-2.0.