This site exists to answer one blunt question, daily: did the United States initiate or significantly escalate armed conflict today? Not rhetorically. Not philosophically. Just: did it happen, yes or no, based on today's news.
It was inspired by the elegant simplicity of isitchristmas.com — which, for the record, is also usually No. The difference is that Christmas comes once a year and is generally considered a good thing.
Every day at noon UTC, a GitHub Action runs a script that fetches top
military and geopolitical headlines from a news API, then sends them to
the Claude API
(claude-sonnet-4-6) with a prompt asking it to make a determination. The
result — status, tagline, and supporting headlines — is written to a
status.json file in the repo, which triggers an automatic
redeploy. What you see on the homepage is whatever that file says.
For the purposes of this site, "armed conflict" includes: airstrikes, military invasions, significant new troop deployments into active conflict zones, or weapons transfers that directly and immediately enable ongoing combat operations. It does not include: ongoing operations that were already underway with no new escalation, sanctions, diplomatic threats, military posturing without action, or strongly worded press releases.
This site is a joke. A serious joke, but a joke. The determination is made by an AI reading headlines — not by lawyers, historians, or anyone with a security clearance. "War" is legally and politically contested when you're the United States. The U.S. has been in varying states of armed engagement continuously for most of the past several decades, which is itself the whole point.
The Unclear status exists precisely because the U.S. government has historically gone to great lengths to avoid calling things what they are. If lawyers are arguing about it, we'll say so.
This site is fully open source. The code, the automation pipeline, and the prompt are all visible on GitHub. Pull requests for better taglines welcome.