Product licence

This licence covers every playbook, field guide, template, and checklist we distribute, paid or free. It is the answer to "can my team use this?" and "can I put this in a client deliverable?"

The short version: you can use everything we sell to do your job, including for clients. You cannot republish it, resell it, or hand it to people who did not buy it.

You are buying a licence to use the work, not the copyright in it. Geist Labs retains ownership of all intellectual property in its publications. Nothing here transfers or assigns any of it.

The licence is personal to you or, for a team licence, to the organisation named on the order. It is non-exclusive, worldwide, non-transferable, and non-sublicensable, and it lasts as long as you comply with these terms.

If you are not sure which you have, it is an individual licence. Team licences are issued explicitly and named on the order.

You may:

• Read, print, and store the material for your own use across your devices.
• Apply everything in it in your work, including paid work for an employer or a client.
• Adapt the templates — AGENTS.md files, context maps, repository structures, workflow definitions, checklists — and commit the adapted versions into your own or your employer's codebase, including private and internal repositories.
• Use adapted templates in client deliverables, where the template is a working part of the system you are building or the documentation you are handing over, and not the deliverable itself.
• Quote short extracts publicly with attribution to Geist Labs and a link to the source, for review, teaching, or commentary.
• Share the material with your own professional advisers where they need it to advise you.

Adapted templates that you have configured for a real system are yours to keep and use. We claim nothing in your codebase, your configuration, or your client's system.

You may not:

• Redistribute, resell, sublicense, rent, lend, or give away the material, in whole or in substantial part, in any format.
• Publish it, or a lightly edited derivative of it, anywhere publicly accessible — including a public repository, a file-sharing service, a paid or free community, or a course.
• Share your copy, your download link, or your access credentials outside the seats your licence covers.
• Repackage the material as your own training, course, workshop, template pack, or publication, whether or not you charge for it.
• Remove, obscure, or alter any copyright notice, attribution, watermark, or licence text.
• Use the material as training, fine-tuning, or evaluation data for a machine learning model, or ingest it into a retrieval system that serves users outside your licensed seats. Using an AI assistant to help you apply the material to your own work is fine; building a product on top of our corpus is not.
• Circumvent any technical measure protecting the material.

This is the question that comes up most, so it is worth being precise.

Permitted: you are engaged to set up an AI engineering workflow for a client. You take our context map template, adapt it to their repositories, and commit it. You use our review checklist to run the review and give them the findings. You take the operating loop and configure it for their pipeline. All fine — the template is functioning as part of the system you built.

Not permitted: you hand the client our playbook, or a reformatted copy of it, as the deliverable. You run our workshop material as your own training session. You attach our checklist to a proposal as an appendix. In each case the material itself is what is being delivered, and that requires a licence for the client.

If a client wants their own copy, they should buy one, or you should buy a team licence covering the engagement. Ask us and we will sort out something sensible for consultancies — this is a normal request.

Free resources are licensed on the same terms as an individual licence: use them, adapt them, apply them in your work, do not redistribute or repackage them. Requesting a free resource does not create a team licence, and a free resource may not be bundled into anything you distribute.

Attribution is not required when you use an adapted template inside a system. It is required when you quote the material publicly, and it is appreciated anywhere else. Where you do attribute, "Geist Labs" with a link to geistlabs.dev is enough.

If you send us suggestions, corrections, or ideas about a publication, we may use them to improve it without obligation or payment to you. You keep your own rights in anything you send; you are just not restricting ours. We will not publish your name or your organisation's name in connection with feedback without asking you first.

The licence begins when the product is delivered and continues indefinitely.

It ends if you materially breach these terms and do not fix the breach within 14 days of us telling you about it, or if the purchase is refunded or reversed. On termination you must stop using the material and delete the copies you hold — except that adapted templates already committed into a working system may stay there, because ripping working configuration out of a live codebase helps nobody.

Termination does not entitle you to a refund unless the refund is the reason the licence ended.

We enforce this licence, but proportionately. If we find our material somewhere it should not be, the first step is an email asking for it to be taken down. Almost everything ends there.

This licence is governed by the laws of the State of North Carolina, United States, and is read together with the Terms of sale and the Terms of use. Consumers keep the protection of the mandatory law of their country of residence.

Licensing questions — team seats, consultancy use, a client who wants a bulk arrangement — go through the contact form. We answer these quickly and we are not difficult about them.